Picking Replacement for Stevens to Test Obama's Liberal Commitment

From The Hill, an excellent take on the politics that surround President Obama's choice of a nominee to replace Justice Stevens:

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens’s retirement will test President Barack Obama’s commitment to his liberal activist base.

Even conservatives groups recognize that Obama is likely to replace Stevens, the leader of the court’s liberal bloc, with another liberal, so the selection would not shift the ideological nature of the high court.

The question is just how far Obama will go to appease liberal legal activists, who were not completely sated by the selection of Sonia Sotomayor, the president’s first choice to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Obama will have a chance to name a second justice to the court in two years because of Stevens’s retirement.