By linking to that New Republic article, I was trying to be fairenbalanst, but I don’t vouch for it.
I have seen others give statistics that looked opposite. I do not know how to reconcile them right now. I note that the NR says
Careful reading (and other material that I will try to locate) suggests that the Dems have approved very few of Bush’s appellate court nominees. Note that the quote says “Clinton’s appellate court nominees,” but it says, “Bush’s nominees.”
I will try to find a fair statistical comparison. I care more about accurate statistical analyisis than I am about conservative causes.
Judges are appointed with “the advice and consent of the Senate.” Maybe if presidents in general, and GW in particular leaned a little more on the advice side of the equation they wouldn’t have so much trouble.
Judges of the federal courts are not members of the president’s “team” and there is no reason that the Senate should rush to consider judges they deem to be bad choices based on their records.
Do you really believe that the senators don’t know all about the records of these appointees?
While this whole process has gotten a bit unseemly, one has to understand, december, what you are asking the Democrats to do here if they are the ones to adopt the moral high ground…Essentially, you are asking them to cave in to a Republican strategy of packing the court by delaying on Clinton nominees until such time as a Republican President takes the White House and can fill those vacancies with his nominees. You are teaching them that such underhanded tactics pay.
I think a very reasonable compromise for the Democrats to make is the one discussed in the New Republic article…essentially to say, “Well, we will let you fill these vacancies that you created by blocking our appointments. However, we do demand in return that you appoint moderates and fairly moderate conservatives of the Kennedy and O’Connor mold rather than the sort of rabid conservatives of the Scalia, Thomas, and Bork mold.” Otherwise, the only lesson learned by the Republicans will be that their tactics during the Clinton administration paid off and they should continue them in the future.
In terms of the first 100 nominees, Hatch’s figures look like apples-to-apples. On that basis, Leahy has been far slower. Leahy & the Dems approved only 57 in an average of 150 days; Hatch and pubbies apprrved 97 in an average of 93 days. Furthermore, the Hatch pace was only a bit slower than the first 100 appointments of the two prior Presidents. The New Republic didn’t give a figure for the first 100 nominations.
The New Republic says that the pubbies only approved 52 judges in Clinton’s last 4 years, yet Hatch said they approved 97 of his first 100 nominees in an average of 93 days. Hatch also says that in the 6 years when the pubbies were in charge, the number of vacancies went DOWN from 70 to 67.
In terms of the number of nominees in the pipeline, Hatch says there were 41 at the end of Clinton’s term and 52 at the end of Papa Bush’s term. OTOH look at the New Republic quote above. It’s hard to see how all could be true.
One point is that the NR picks its samples. First it addresses appellate nominees in the 6 years 1995 - 2001. Then it looks at all judicial nominees in the 4 years 1997 - 2001. This raises a possibilty that specific sub-samples were selected to make Hatch’s record look worse than it really was.
Y’know this sort of score keeping, on a lethal level, leads to the tit-for-tat killings in the mideast and gets nowhere. Sooner or later some accomodation has to be made. The Congress, by the power of the purse, eventually has the last word.
The question I have is, why should the senators rush to hear an explanation of a record that they already think is unsuitable for appointment as a US judge?
There must be numerous people who are reasonably close to GW’s political philosophy who could be confirmed without a lot of bruhaha. One of the president’s jobs is to appoint for judgships those who can get through the confirmation process. Didin’t GW kind of promise to appoint “his kind of judge” during the election campaign? What do you suppose he meant by that? Was he so stupid, or full of hubris, that he thought he could bludgeon the senate giving consideration to just anybody he puts up just because he the president?
Note the unfairness of the Democratic charge. When Joseph McCarthy said there were 31 Communists working in the State Department, he couldn’t be proved wrong, because he didn’t identify the supposed communists. Similarly, when the dems say these nominees are “out of the mainstream”, they’re on safe grounds, as long as they don’t idenfify which nominees they’re complaining about. That’s why they won’t hold hearings. Then the nominees would be exposed as qualified and honorable.
I don’t have to suppose. He said what he meant by it, and it was essentially the description Sua Sponte provided earlier in this thread:
Note which party controlled the Senate during Clinton’s first two years, and the corresponding approval rate Hatch would like to have you consider the standard for this Congress. Surely an actuary can grasp the fundamental dishonesty of that pious argument.
Bush did promise to “appoint more justices like Scalia and Thomas”, ya know. That’s the problem - and there have been no more activist, precedent-ignoring Justices in recent memory. Nor is that what We the People voted for, either.
Good point, Elvis. In fact that rate was comparable to the pace at which a Democratic Senate approved nominees for Reagan & Bush Senior. In other words, Hatch’s statistics show that Democrats haven’t matched their own standard.
To make a valid comparison the other way, there would have had to be a Democrat first elected President along with a Republican Senate. I cannot remember when that last occurred.
This is a strong accusation. Can you back it up with a list of their many precedent-ignoring, activist decisions?
(I bet it would be a lot easier to find precedent-ignoring decisions on the other side. E.g., decisions to rule the death penalty unconstitutional even after the SCOTUS had held it to be Constitutional.)
But doesn’t that ignore the Republicans’ standard? And isn’t that what the question was about in the first place? Democrats must be lapdogs, but Republicans can do whatever they feel like?
Do you think Scalia was being fair in the 2000 election decision when he already announced Bush the winner? And why is it that judges who lean liberal get slapped with the “activist” tag, when someone like Limbaugh (the judge, not the pontificator) doesn’t when he issued his “video games are not speech” ruling (with a load of crap for backing)?
Are you talking federal or state judges? I don’t know of any federal judges declaring the DP unconstitutional lately, but a state judge can because it would be based on that state’s constitution.
Hatch’s speech included other statistics that compared Clinton’s results with a Republican Senate vs. Bush’s results with a Democratic Senate.
There were several questions. The question in the OP was whether Leahy is right to not hold hearings. For that question, it is relevant that other Democratic Senates did hold hearinngs and make decisions.
IANAL. SCOTUS by 7 to 2 ruled that the Florida SC had behaved wrongly. (The other two didn’t disagree; they just didn’t want to take jurisdiction.) Whether Scalia et al were right or wrong, they certainly weren’t ignoring precedent, in this unique case. If anything, it was the 2 dissenters who were arguably ignoring SCOTUS’s precedent of routinely over-ruling State SC decisions that they felt violated civil rights.
I didn’t like that decision, either, but I don’t know that it violated precedent. BTW I think that Judge Stephen Limbaugh is a cousin of Rush and, oddly enough, a good friend of Black Democrat Judge Ronnie White, who was attacked unfairly by John Ashcroft.
Wow, december is asking for cites. He really does have a sense of humor.
Re Scalia’s (and his marionette Thomas’) judicial activism, that has been discussed heavily in this forum, and you’ve even participated. Try a Search. A quick summary is that his (their) “original intent” ideology is inherently activist and nonconservative because it throws out two centuries of historyand case law and precedent, whenever inconvenient, in favor of idolatry of James Madison and company.
Now why would anyone want to support such dishonesty in the lifetime-appointed judiciary? Could it be to provide some veneer of respectable rationalization for verdicts the right wants reached for ideological or even religious grounds?
Since YANAL, perhaps you might want to check your facts before you make this claim:
[quote]
In the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, some commentators suggested that it really was a 7-2 decision. See Michael McConnell, A Muddled Ruling, Wall St. J., Dec. 14, 2000, at A26. It was not. Two of the dissenting Justices, Breyer and Souter, agreed that there were equal protection problems with counting votes without uniform standards. See Bush, 121 S. Ct. at 545 (Souter, J., dissenting); id. at 551 (Breyer, J., dissenting). However, their opinions were expressly labeled as dissents. They could have “concurred in part and dissented in part,” but did not. Moreover, the key difference between the majority and the dissents was whether the counting should be halted or continued. The five Justices in the majority voted to end the counting; the four dissenting Justices would have allowed it to continue. The case was clearly and obviously a 5-4 ruling.
–Erwin Chemerinsky, Bush v. Gore Was Not Justiciable, 76 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1093, footnote 4 (2001).
Polycarp, since our DLF isn’t going to respond to your post, I’d like to point out that your email addy in your profile is bouncing. Could you pls email me when you get a minute?
Andros, I answered your PM; thanks for the heads up on my e-mail.
Nope. If your verb had been “opined” you’d have been accurate. But the ruling was a 5-4 one. The two dissents by Souter and Breyer have no legal standing as rulings; dissents simply lay the groundwork for argument in future cases that might overturn a precedent set in the case in which they were dissents.
