While most legal and political analysts assume that any Supreme Court nominee put forward by President Obama would fail to survive a filibuster by Senate Republicans, there is one name out there that remains intriguing.

Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson is an attorney with a considerable resume in the public and private sector who already survived the Senate vetting process (just 2 1/2 years ago), winning the Cabinet appointment to lead the Department of Homeland Security by a 78-16 vote.

Johnson, a Democrat, is a low-key moderate when it comes to politics. As a consequence, Obama’s nomination of Johnson, an African-American, for DHS in 2013 was greeted with derision by many liberal pundits who declared that he was too conservative on national security issues.

The idea of Johnson emerging as an Obama compromise pick for the SCOTUS vacancy was first floated by, of all people, MSNBC’s liberal TV host Rachel Maddow. Shortly after the announced death of Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday, Maddow said this on NBC:

“The first person who springs to mind for that kind of a scenario is Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, who is a very distinguished attorney, who is a personally very reserved and non-ideological person but has served in several administrations, as a top Pentagon lawyer, as a very trusted national security expert and legal mind.”

An endorsement by Maddow certainly will not turn GOP senators’ heads. Johnson is not a conservative icon in the mold of Scalia. But he has earned praise from Republicans and Democrats in Congress for the job he has done at DHS.

And he was lauded for the job he did as general counsel of the Department of Defense by former Pentagon chief Bob Gates, a Republican who made history serving consecutively as the Defense Secretary under Republican President George W. Bush and Democratic President Obama.

 

 

 

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