O'Connor resigning - what's the timeline?

So President Bush is going to get a Supreme Court nomination. Finally. Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman on the Supreme Court, nominated by Ronald Reagan in 1981, is resigning.

I linked a couple of weeks ago to an excellent table compiled by Progress for America, detailing the dates and details of the last 9 Supreme Court nominations. If the past is any guide, these are the kinds of event timings that we can look for.

• The average length of time from announcement of the vacancy to announcement of the replacement candidate is 33 days. This is skewed by a couple of things. Breyer and Ginsburg filled vacancies that were announced in early spring. Kennedy wasn't nominated until after the Bork nomination failed. And the table has the same timetable for both Scalia and Rehnquist as Rehnquist was elevated to CJ on the same day that Scalia was nominated for associate justice, and those both happened on the same day that Warren Burger resigned. Looking at just replacements for end-of-term resignations (Thomas, Souter, Bork, Scalia/Rehnquist, O'Connor) we have an average of 6 days from vacancy to nomination, with a high of 19 for O'Connor (Potter Stewart actually announced his resignation two weeks before the end of term) and a low of 0 for Scalia/Rehnquist. It would be very surprising if we do not have a nominee a week from now.


• The average wait time from the announcement of the nomination to the first Senate hearing was ~54 days, with a low of 33 and a high of 71. So we should expect hearings towards the end of August, the week of the 22nd or the 29th. Anything before August 3rd or after September 15th would be precedent-setting.


• From nomination to final Senate action, the average was 84 days, with a low of 50 days (Ginsburg) and a high of 114 days (Bork). 85 days from now is September 24th.


• From the first Senate hearing to the final Senate vote, the average was just about a month, 31 days. The high was 51 for Kennedy, the low was 12 for O'Connor.

Summary:

Projected Timeline (Based on last 9 nominations)

	Announcement	First Senate Action	Final Senate Action
Fast	7/1/2005	8/3/2005	8/15/2005
Average	7/7/2005	8/30/2005	9/30/2005
Slow	9/26/2005	12/11/2005	1/31/2006

It is my fear and expectation that whoever is nominated, the process will more closely resemble the Bork nomination than the Ginsburg nomination, despite the fact that I believe her to be further from the judicial and cultural mainstream than he is. It's clear from everything we've seen over the past 20 years that the Democrats and the fringe groups on the left, Ralph Neas and PFAW, and NARAL, will assault the Bush nominee with everything they can, regardless of facts. The question is whether the Senate Republicans will have the backbone to stand up to it. And whether those 7 Democrats that signed the MOU are willing to live up to the terms of it, and if they fail, whether the 7 Republicans will be willing to hold their feet to the fire.


The first public comments from everyone on the Democratic side following the nomination, whoever it is will go something like this: "The President had an opportunity to nominate a qualified and confirmable candidate. Unfortunately he chose to be a divider, not a uniter, and nominate X, a far-right extremist who clearly lacks the judicial temperament for a lifetime seat on the highest court in the land."