A thread with some thoughts on Merrick Garland, whom Politico is reporting has been selected as attorney general by President-elect Joe Biden...

Garland is principally famous outside the D.C. legal world for having been nominated to the Supreme Court by President Obama in 2016 and having been shamefully blocked by Senate Republicans for nearly the entire year. This is a shame. And his treatment ithen is not the reason /2/

why he is the perfect choice for Biden for attorney general. Indeed, his martyrdom on this point actually complicates the picture a little bit; while Republicans generally refrained from attacking him, the very fact of the nomination and their stonewalling of it makes ... /3/

...him appear a more divisive figure from a partisan perspective than he actually is. Which is a somewhat backhanded way of saying that Garland is the closest thing to an above-politics figure as exists in American law today. He is among the most admired federal judges /4/

...on the bench from either political movement. He is admired for his intellect, for his integrity and his fidelity to the law and precedent, and for his temperament. He has been on the bench for a long time—since 1997, if memory serves. /5/