OUR REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT:

In intentionally picking a middle-of-the-road jurist, they say, Obama threatened to replace one of the court's notable advocates for the rights of defendants and criminal suspects - the late Antonin Scalia - with someone whose publicly discussed decisions give little indication of similar inclinations.

Though almost anyone with a public profile calls Garland well-qualified and his decisions well-written, one ruling increasingly is attracting attention: His first opinion as an appeals judge in 1997, in which he and two colleagues upheld the warrantless search of a car trunk in the nation's capital.

Two years prior, a U.S. Park Police officer stopped a car without a front license plate and said he smelled pot smoke before seeing torn cigar papers and a bag containing a green substance through the car's windows. A warrantless trunk search then revealed 62 grams of crack cocaine and $825 in cash.

Garland found in the case, U.S. v. Turner, that the officer was allowed to search the trunk without a warrant, beating back arguments that a suspect's personal drug use does not establish probable cause to believe a car's trunk also contains contraband.

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