Obama on Screening Garland: ‘I Have the Advantage of Having Taught Constitutional Law’

TOTENBERG: “What do you ask these folks in your interviews? I mean, you can't say, ‘So, what do you think of Roe v. Wade?’ That would be improper, right?”
OBAMA: “I do not do that.”
TOTENBERG: “So, I'm Judge Totenberg. I'm here for my interview. What are you going to ask me? What kinds of things do you ask?”
OBAMA: “Well, sometimes I just ask about family and background and what made you want to be a judge. You learn a lot just by talking to people about what their story is. And when you hear Judge Garland's background — when you hear that story about him as a valedictorian speaker standing up for a fellow student who was about to be censored by the parents, when you hear about the care with which he dealt with the victims and the families who had been affected by the Oklahoma City bombing — you get a sense of who that person is. And I spent a lot of time on that. With respect to judicial philosophy, I have the advantage of having taught constitutional law, so I don't need to get into the weeds on their thinking on a lot of these cases — because I can just read their opinions and the quality of their work and I have a pretty good sense of how they approach cases. One thing I, I do ask them is how do they generally approach a problem where the text of the Constitution might be ambiguous. What do they do to — to understand either the meaning of the text, to what extent do they draw on historical data, to what extent do they draw on their sense of how society is dealing with that problem today? You know, so you'll get some sense of their judicial philosophy. But most of the time, by the time they get to me, you know, they've probably gone through a confirmation process before. And they have a pretty good sense of what they can talk about and what they shouldn't talk about.”