SCOTUS nominee watch. Announcement coming tomorrow morning. MSNBC reports that it's Kagan.

[jefferson_dem]

UPDATE:

BREAKING NEWS: President Obama to name Elena Kagan to U.S. Supreme Court, NBC News reports

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/?ocid=twitter/

Tom Goldstein | Sunday, May 9th, 2010 6:44 pm

The Administration plans to identify its nominee in “guidance” at 7:20 tomorrow morning, with a formal announcement by the President at 11 a.m.

If the nominee is Elena Kagan, then Mike Allen of Politico will go down as the reporter with the best information on the Administration’s thinking, bar none.

In the event of a Kagan nomination, here is how the nomination process is likely to play out. I divide it into process and substance.

First, the process: Note the relationship between Monday’s announcement and the Senate calendar. There are seven weeks between Monday and June 28. Six to seven weeks is traditionally regarded as the minimum amount of time between a nomination announcement and hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee. June 28 marks the last week the Senate is in session before its July 4 recess, which runs from Saturday, July 3 to Sunday, July 11. So, tomorrow’s announcement is timed to permit hearings to be conducted prior to the recess, if (and it’s a big if) the Senate Judiciary Committee agrees.

Whether they will agree will depend on a number of factors. Kagan’s relatively short paper trail – note the contrast with the nearly two decades of decisions by Sonia Sotomayor – means there is less to review, and thus less time is required prior to the start of hearings. Kagan was also recently confirmed by the same Committee as Solicitor General.

Senate Democrats will prefer to move the process forward quickly for two reasons: so that Kagan is not “left hanging” for nine weeks before she appears before the Committee; and so that the nomination can be moved forward to make room in the calendar for legislative efforts. On the other hand, Republicans, as the opposition, will prefer delay because as more time passes there is a greater chance that something will emerge that justifies defeating (or at least undercuts) the nomination.

<SNIP>

http://www.scotusblog.com/2010/05/where-we-go-from-here/

100% confirmed - it's NOT Diane Wood.
ggreenwald

http://twitter.com/ggreenwald/statuses/13698553301

[no_hypocrisy]

1. What if this has been a fake-out?

The WH putting out Kagan's name and actually nominating another on Monday.

[jefferson_dem]

2. Could happen.

I would love to see it, just for the theater if nothing else. Someone like Deval Patrick would be :bounce:!

Still, the money (literally) is on Kagan. She's at 75% on intrade now.

[MadBadger]

6. Id love to see all this hand wringing be for nothing

[WheelWalker]

4. Minow

[Phx_Dem]

5. Wouldn't that be hilarious?! I'll have to call in sick because

I'll be laughing too hard to drive! The media deserves a good punking.

[Phx_Dem]

3. Thanks for the heads up!!! I'm excited!

:7 :patriot:

[Clio the Leo]

7. ... and more on why what Mike Allen says matters....

This article is a couple weeks old, but a good Sunday night read.

Before he goes to sleep, between 11 and midnight, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, typically checks in by e-mail with the same reporter: Mike Allen of Politico, who is also the first reporter Pfeiffer corresponds with after he wakes up at 4:20. A hyperactive former Eagle Scout, Allen will have been up for hours, if he ever went to bed. Whether or not he did is one of the many little mysteries that surround him. The abiding certainty about Allen is that sometime between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m., seven days a week, he hits “send” on a mass e-mail newsletter that some of America’s most influential people will read before they say a word to their spouses.

Allen’s e-mail tipsheet, Playbook, has become the principal early-morning document for an elite set of political and news-media thrivers and strivers. Playbook is an insider’s hodgepodge of predawn news, talking-point previews, scooplets, birthday greetings to people you’ve never heard of, random sightings (“spotted”) around town and inside jokes. It is, in essence, Allen’s morning distillation of the Nation’s Business in the form of a summer-camp newsletter.

Like many in Washington, Pfeiffer describes Allen with some variation on “the most powerful” or “important” journalist in the capital. The two men exchange e-mail messages about six or eight times a day. Allen also communes a lot with Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff; Robert Gibbs, the press secretary; David Axelrod, President Obama’s senior adviser; and about two dozen other White House officials. But Pfeiffer is likely Allen’s main point of contact, the one who most often helps him arrive at a “West Wing Mindmeld,” as Playbook calls it, which is essentially a pro-Obama take on that day’s news. (Allen gets a similar fill from Republicans, which he also disseminates in Playbook.)

Pfeiffer tells Allen the message that the Obama administration is trying to “drive” that morning — “drive” being the action verb of choice around the male-dominated culture of Politico, a three-year-old publication, of which the oft-stated goal is to become as central to political addicts as ESPN is to sports junkies. “Drive” is a stand-in for the stodgier verb “influence.” If, say, David S. Broder and R. W. Apple Jr. were said to “influence the political discourse” through The Washington Post and The New York Times in the last decades of the 20th century, Politico wants to “drive the conversation” in the new-media landscape of the 21st. It wants to “win” every news cycle by being first with a morsel of information, whether or not the morsel proves relevant, or even correct, in the long run — and whether the long run proves to be measured in days, hours or minutes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/25/magazine/25allen-t.html

[jefferson_dem]

8. NBC's Pete Williams reporting now that it's Kagan.

n/t

[Clio the Leo]

9. Did they break in to network coverage....

... or did you see that on Twitter too?

[jefferson_dem]

10. Chuckles Todd tossed out a tweet, encouraging everyone to tune into MSNBC at 10:00.

So I did. At that point, Pete was on with his bulletin about it being Kagan.

Impressive. I think that's how this new media thing is supposed to work.

[Clio the Leo]

12. You know, Mike Allen said Friday it would be leaked Sun. night...

.... so I guess we can presume that was it. The WH leaked it to NBC specifically. I'm an inside baseball freak and would love to know the logistics of how and why that happened. Why NBC specifically. The love and attention the WH gives to the networks (and not everyone else) is always interesting.

[high density]

11. Kerry Chooses Gephardt!

[geek tragedy]

13. Everyone knew that it would be Kagan.

Most boring choice ever.

[Kdillard]

14. It would be nice if they turned out to be wrong.