The East Room was bright on 26 May 2009, and Barack Obama stood beside Sonia Sotomayor as he named her for the Supreme Court seat left by David H. Souter. It was the first great test of his promise to choose judges with common sense and pragmatism, not ideology, and the Senate confirmed her on 6 August 2009 by 68 votes to 31.

Obama had spent years thinking aloud about the Court. In 2007, before the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, he said the bench should be a refuge for the powerless, and in the 2008 campaign he praised people with life experience, even holding up Earl Warren as a model of empathy. Yet by October 2008 he had also said he would be troubled by that same kind of activism today, preferring judges like David Souter and Stephen Breyer who applied the Constitution to real facts.

That is why Sotomayor fitted his search so neatly. The White House had drawn up a short list after Souter privately told Obama in April 2009 that he would retire at the end of the term, returning to New Hampshire. Greg Craig, Ron Klain, and Cynthia Hogan helped run the process, and Obama interviewed Sotomayor, Diane Wood, Elena Kagan, and Janet Napolitano before telephoning Sotomayor at 9 pm on 25 May.

The second opening came a year later, after John Paul Stevens announced on 9 April 2010 that he would retire in June. Obama nominated Elena Kagan, then Solicitor General, on 10 May 2010, and the Senate confirmed her by 63 votes to 37 on 5 August 2010. Between Sotomayor and Kagan, he had placed two new justices on a Court that was changing in both age and make-up.

But Obama’s final chance came in winter 2016, after Antonin Scalia was found dead on 13 February at Cibolo Creek Ranch near Marfa, Texas. On 16 March he nominated Merrick Garland, chief judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Republican leaders, led by Mitch McConnell, refused to hold hearings until after the election, and Garland’s nomination expired on 3 January 2017.

The unfinished fight left a trace on the Court itself. During Obama’s presidency, Ruth Bader Ginsburg had long been watched because she turned 80 in 2013 and had survived colon cancer and pancreatic cancer, but she died on 18 September 2020 and was replaced by Amy Coney Barrett on 27 October 2020. Obama’s own two successes remained Sotomayor, sworn in on 8 August 2009, and Kagan, sworn in in 2010, the only justices he ever got to place.