As Democrats and Republicans square up for a titanic fight over the replacement for deceased SC Justice Antonin Scalia, political partisans in America are scouring records to check the ideological orientation of Sri Srinivasan, the Indian-American who President Obama is widely expected to nominate to the bench.
Key Republicans have pledged to block an Obama nomination, but considering Srinivasan sailed through the Senate 97-0 when the Democratic White House put him up for the DC Court of Appeals (the second most powerful court in the country) in 2013, he is considered the President's best bet to overcome Republican opposition. Besides, neither Conservatives nor Liberals have anything toxic against him — a review of his legal and judicial career suggests he is largely ""nonideological.""
"Srinivasan's background is as a litigator, meaning he's spent most of his career defending other people's positions rather than his own. That means that although he's well regarded among legal elites of all stripes, his own views are less than clear," Mother Jones magazine wrote in a profile of him during his earlier nomination, adding that "Srinivasan's unclear record offers Republicans few legitimate reasons to block him," even if it "means that liberals can't be sure that Srinivasan actually shares their views." If anything, the rap against Srinivasan is that he is sympathetic to business interests. In his private sector avatar, he has defended oil giant Exxon and represented energy major Enron's president Jeff Skilling. But his supporters say he was just doing his job as an attorney in a law firm.
On the flip side, as a government lawyer in the solicitor-general's office, he has represented progressive causes — arguing against restrictive voter IDs and supporting affirmative action, although some labour and trade unions have reservations about his corporate representation. About the only glimmer of political leanings is his presence in Al Gore's legal team in the epic Bush v Gore judicial scrap to decide the 2000 presidential election.
At a personal level, he is comfortably Indian in his ethnicity, with none of the cultural conflicts found in many PIOs mainstreaming themselves in America. He took oath on a Bhagwad Gita held by his mother Saroja when he was sworn in as the Appeals Court judge, and among family and friends who attended the ceremony were then PM Manmohan Singh's wife Gursharan Kaur and their daughters Amrit and Upinder. His own younger sister Srinija is an early employee (#5) of Yahoo.
Tales abound of Srinivasan's sense of humour, legal mastery, judicial nous, and thoughtful humility. At the oath-taking ceremony, he joked that he is "humbled by the honoured and distinguished guests... and some of my somewhat less honourable friends from my earlier years." One story goes that the first time Srinivasan argued a case before the HC, he took a single sheet of paper to the podium so he would not appear overconfident. The paper was blank.