Judges, Part 3,947
My obsession with the judicial branch of the US Government continues - as does the battle over who will fill those positions. Hugh Hewitt REPORTS on what exactly we are seeing, and what we should expect to see in the future.
The second most important court in the country is thus two additional conservative jurists short because of GOP fecklessness and infighting.
And some people wonder why there is anger in the Republican base and among its legal elites with the GOP’s senate majority.
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Sen. Chuck Schumer announced last week that there will be no more Supreme Court justices in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Samuel Alito. “Judges are the most important,” he announced. “One more justice would have made it a 5-4 conservative, hard-right majority for a long time. That won’t happen.”
The categorization of four justices on the Supreme Court as “hard-right” is reckless and absurd, an obvious extension of Schumer’s radical and relentless assault on the right of Americans to hold traditional originalist views of the Constitution and its intended operation.
Schumer is a master propagandist, and he never lets up in his effort to define terms in ways favorable to his radical legal agenda of delegitimizing the historical mainstream of American legal theory.
It is also apparent from Schumer’s flat declaration that he has already resolved to block any Supreme Court nominee whom Bush sends forward.
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“The Gang of 14″ forfeited not just the reputations of many fine men and women, it abandoned principle and the Constitution for political expedient.
Frist and McCain will see their presidential ambitions ruined in no small part because of the latter’s authorship of the deal and the former’s failure to stop it.
Expect the new leader of the Senate GOP to understand this, and the other would-be presidential candidates from among the Republicans — especially Sen. Sam Brownback if he runs, and Gov. Mitt Romney — to remind the GOP primary electorate over and over again how great was the defeat masked with the title “Gang of 14.”
I haven’t quite gotten myself up to Bench Memo’s level of optimism yet, for a couple of reasons. First, I have no confidence in the GOP’s willingness to take a tough stance on these. And second, the Dems are way better at getting what they want without paying the political consequences. That was true when they were in the minority, and I think it will still hold true - to at least some degree.
I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.
THIS does very little to persuade me away from the idea that the nomination and approval of judges is of nearly absolute importance.
The NSA denied the request for documents, saying the records would jeopardize national security. The advocacy group argued that the law can’t be used to protect the government from disclosing details about illegal programs.
U.S. Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle disagreed, saying that even if the program is ultimately determined to be illegal, it doesn’t change the fact that the materials are classified and are not covered by the Freedom of Information Act.
