Supreme Court vacancy

Reactions around the web:

Planned Parenthood mans the battle stations.

Byron York on the possibility of a filibuster:

Right now, top Republicans in the Senate do not believe Democrats will filibuster a Supreme Court nominee -- "They won't filibuster," one well-placed source said flatly yesterday -- but the GOP leadership does believe Democrats will do everything in their power to drag out the confirmation process. Holding hearings in August would simply get the process going sooner rather than later. In any event, Republicans believe that the aftermath of the nuclear/constitutional/Byrd option fight has left the GOP, in the words of the well-placed source, "maximally positioned" to conduct a Supreme Court fight.

The ACLU is "concerned."

Progress for America unveils Tar and Feather, Inc.: A Liberal 10-Step Plan for Judicial Character Assassination.

Orin Kerr:

O'Connor's retirement may shift the Court a lot less than people think. In the big ideological cases of the last Term, Justice Kennedy was the swing vote as often as (or maybe even more often than) Justice O'Connor. Let's assume for now that O'Connor is replaced by a consistently more conservative Justice; even if that's true, the left-of-center Justices presumably still have 4 very reliable votes and a good shot at picking up a 5th vote with Kennedy. Plus, new Justices are hard to predict, and it's often hard to tell whether a new Justice will vote consistently one way or another.