Last night President Trump nominated Merrick Garland to fill the seat left by Anthony Kennedy. Just kidding. But he is up for a vote in the Senate. Also just kidding.
No, instead, President Trump nominated a very conservative judge for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh. How conservative? Well, FiveThirtyEight explained in a piece that plotted the judge against his probably peers on the bench, based upon one measure of judicial ideology. And it turns out, spoiler, Kavanaugh sits just to the left of Clarence Thomas. And he sits pretty well to the right.
The graphic itself is an evolution of a piece from last Friday that looked at what were thought to be the four main candidates on Trump’s shortlist.
The final piece, with only Kavanaugh plotted, removes the other potential candidates. And it functions well, using the brighter orange to draw attention from the black dots of the sitting bench and the open dot of the vacant seat. My slight issue is with the predecessor graphic that shows the four candidates.
I probably would have just left off Barrett as she did not have a score. While I have no doubt that she would score to the right based upon all the reading I have done over the past several days, it feels a bit odd to place her on the graphic at all. Instead, I probably would have used an asterisk or a footnote to say that she did not have a score and thus was not placed.
Credit for the piece goes to Oliver Roeder and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.
