Plan for Two?:

Howard points out that Drudge has a report that the White House is planning for two vacancies to open up at the Supreme Court:

  President Bush’s top political and legal advisers have been quietly planning for the possibility that two Supreme Court justices will step down from the bench at the end of this term, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
  “Plan for two,” the president recently told senior staff, sources claim.

  Of course, planning alone doesn’t mean much; Presidents have been planning for an opening in the current Court since Breyer arrived in 1994.

  An aside: I wonder, what role will the legal blogs play in the debate over future Supreme Court nominees? A big one, I would think. The merits of nominee X will be the topic of the month, and the debate will be much faster, more sophisticated, and more widely read by legal insiders than anything in the MSM.

  UPDATE: Tom Goldstein offers some very helpful thoughts here. For what it’s worth, I’m with Tom that it’s highly unlikely that any of the sitting Associate Justices would be nominated for the Chief position. While Justice O’Connor has mostly been a centrist during her time on the Court, these days she breaks left more often than she breaks right; it’s hard to imagine the White House considering her. Kennedy breaks left in the politically-important culture-war cases, so he’s out. Scalia and Thomas are rock-solid conservatives, but they’re among the least skilled tacticians on the Court; not great Chief material. Given that, look for the White House to nominate an outsider.