Supreme Court Confirmation
stcynic | May 19, 2006Sandefur links to this article by Harvey Silvergate in Reason about J. Michael Luttig's resignation from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to become the chief counsel for Boeing. That article in turn refers to a piece in the Wall Street Journal that is no longer available, unfortunately. Both articles argue that Luttig's resignation was prompted by Luttig's anger at the administration's handling of the Padilla case. I'll post a long excerpt below the fold, beginning with Silvergate's explanation of the Padilla situation and how Luttig was involved:
Simply put, after years of helping…
stcynic | May 10, 2006This is interesting. J. Michael Luttig, a leading conservative judge and scholar who has often been mentioned as a potential Supreme Court nominee and would certainly be on the short list for the next vacancy should it happen before 2008, has resigned from the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. He will be moving to the private sector, where he will become the vice president and general counsel for Boeing. At 51 years old, Luttig has been an appellate judge for 15 years and his chances of being named to the Supreme Court were probably the best of any sitting judge, along with perhaps Michael…
stcynic | January 23, 2006In an interesting turn of events, Geoffrey Stone of the University of Chicago Law School has come out against the confirmation of Samuel Alito. His argument is based solely on Alito's views on executive power:
Whatever else Judge Alito may or may not have made clear about his views on such issues as abortion, federalism, and religious freedom, he has certainly made clear that he has no interest in restraining the acts of this commander-in-chief. That, in my judgment, poses a serious threat to the nation, and is a more than adequate reason for the Senate - Republicans and Democrats alike - to…
stcynic | January 10, 2006Yesterday I highlighted the absurdities of Sen. Cornyn's opening remarks about Judge Alito's nomination. Today I think I'll point the spotlight at Sen. Kennedy on the other side of the aisle. His opening statement (scroll down) was no less ridiculous. Kennedy referred to a study by Cass Sunstein, a distinguished liberal legal scholar from the University of Chicago, of Judge Alito's opinions:
In an era when too many Americans are losing their jobs or working for less, trying to make ends meet, in close cases Judge Alito has ruled the vast majority of the time against the claims of the…
stcynic | January 9, 2006Radley Balko has come out against the Alito nomination and he makes some very valid points in the process. The one thing that really disturbs me about Alito is his deference to the other branches of government.
stcynic | January 9, 2006As I mentioned, I did get to hear a few minutes of Sen. John Cornyn's (R-Texas) opening remarks in this morning's Alito confirmation hearing and got a good chuckle out of it. As is common among partisans of both parties, he portrayed he and his party as motivated solely by a concern for truth and justice while the other party is beholden to "special interest groups" and beset by ulterior motives. It's this kind of pot-and-kettle rhetoric that convinces me that it is folly to take either party seriously. For instance:
If qualifications, integrity, fairness, and open-mindedness were all that…
stcynic | January 9, 2006I've had the Alito confirmation hearing on in the other room but I haven't been paying attention to them because, frankly, the opening statements by the senators on the committee are pretty much meaningless hot air. But as I was walking through the room I heard Brit Hume mention Robert Bork and I stopped for a second to catch what he said. I'm glad I did - what he said was false. He said:
"He had a reasoned position on a line of cases leading to Roe v Wade and he argued it in such a way that it gave the impression that he didn't think there was a right to privacy in the constitution. He didn'…
stcynic | December 28, 2005CNN has a long review of the job Chief Justice John Roberts is doing so far at the Supreme Court. By all accounts, the other justices have embraced him and he has shown great understanding of and affinity for court tradition. The article contains some interesting items for those of us who really watch the court and how the justices interact with one another:
And so it has gone this term, where an atmosphere of practically buoyant camaraderie has drifted through an institution that prides itself on continuity and certainty. This is in stark contrast to the mood during the year preceding…
stcynic | November 14, 2005Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute has a report on Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito noting that he has a decidedly libertarian streak in many of his rulings. Somin writes:
Most debate about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has focused on his propensity to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade and the similarity between him and conservative Justice Antonin Scalia. But despite the superficial parallels between the two conservative, Italian-American Catholic jurists, it is important to recognize that Alito has a substantial libertarian dimension to his jurisprudence as well as a conservative one. In…
stcynic | November 12, 2005Richard Epstein, who would certainly be on my short list of supreme court nominees if I was President, has written an interesting essay evaluating the arguments against confirming Samuel Alito so far. This was written before the conflict of interest stuff came out, so it's based only on his judicial record. I generally agree with his arguments. There is nothing so far to justify voting against him.
stcynic | November 11, 2005A potential glitch in the Alito nomination has arisen. He is taking some criticism for not recusing himself from a 2003 appeals court case involving the Vanguard Group, a mutual fund company. In his 1990 confirmation hearing for the appeals court, he promised to recuse himself from any cases involving this company, with whom he has over $400,000 invested in a mutual fund. But 13 years later, he heard a case involving a woman's claim against that company, a claim that had been dismissed by a lower court.
He and two other judges from that appeals court upheld the lower court's dismissal in a 3…
stcynic | November 2, 2005Blue Mass Group has an interesting interview with Kate Pringle, a former clerk for Samuel Alito as well as for Stephen Breyer and Sandra Day O'Connor (how's that for a resume?). Unlike Alito, Pringle is a liberal and a Democrat who was highly involved in John Kerry's campaign. Nonetheless, she is a staunch supporter of Alito's nomination. To some extent, that's inevitable; former clerks tend to be fiercely loyal to the judges they clerked for. But Pringle offers some pretty good arguments for her position as well:
I wondered what Pringle meant by a "strong conservative intellectual approach…
stcynic | November 1, 2005Howard Friedman has an invaluable list of all of Alito's religion clause rulings, including links to all of the actual rulings. Great place to start looking at his track record.
stcynic | October 31, 2005As I'm sure everyone knows by now, President Bush has nominated Samuel Alito to replace Harriet Miers and will send his name to the Senate for confirmation to take Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court. It's an interesting pick to me, as I would have put him about 3rd or 4th on the list of others with similar credentials. The pick was determined by the criteria Bush chose to use. If he was going to try again for a woman, there was one short list; if he was going to try and name the first hispanic to the court, there was a different short list. And if he was going to just pick from…
stcynic | October 27, 2005As I predicted last weekend, Harriet Miers has withdrawn as a nominee to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. This paves the way for someone competent to be named to the court. But far more important than that, it wins me another dinner from my buddy Dan Ray. And that's what really matters, right?
In his statement accepting her resignation, Bush of course had to spread a little manure around that even a 10 year old would know is nonsense:
I understand and share her concern, however, about the current state of the Supreme Court confirmation process. It is clear that senators…
stcynic | October 26, 2005Two of my favorite thinkers weigh in on the Miers nomination. So sayeth Radley Balko:
On Monday, the Washington Post ran excerpts of a 1992 article Harriet Miers wrote for Texas Lawyer. I've read the thing several times, now. I haven't the foggiest idea what it's actually about. Or advocating. Or why it was written. It's like she took a couple of New Republic articles, a couple of Legal Times articles, pulled an AP wire story off of Lexis, tossed them in a food processor, then poured the concotion into a new-like article. Like the quotes excerpted by David Brooks a couple of weeks ago, Miers…
stcynic | October 25, 2005Jack Balkin has a long and thorough essay on how Democrats should respond to the Miers nomination and he says much the same thing I've been saying. As he notes, the Democrats are currently in popcorn mode - sitting back, munching their popcorn and enjoying watching the Republicans yell at each other and call each other names. But at some point, if the administration does not withdraw her nomination, they're going to have to decide whether to vote for her or against her. If their only concern is the balance on the court and the outcome of cases, they're better off voting for Miers because she…
stcynic | October 24, 2005Radley Balko is his usual ascerbic self after noting Arlen Specter's statement that Harriet Miers' nomination was still moving ahead okay but "she might need a crash course in constitutional law":
I picture Harriet Miers burning the midnight oil at the library with her Emmanuel Con Law outline all dog-eared up, a cup of Water Joe and a pack of smokes close at hand. "Sorry Senator, only had time to read every other page. Not really sure about the privileges and immunities stuff. Besides, I'm only here pass/fail."
Hey, Harriet, lemme' help you out. I got hold of a killer outline from this 2L…
stcynic | October 22, 2005This just keeps getting worse and worse for the White House. The questionnaire that Harriet Miers filled out was so bad that they sent it back to have her redo her answers. How bad was it? The LA Times reports:
Asked to describe the constitutional issues she had worked on during her legal career, Supreme Court nominee Harriet E. Miers had relatively little to say on the questionnaire she sent to the Senate this week.
And what she did say left many constitutional experts shaking their heads.
At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on…
stcynic | October 17, 2005The conservative columnist David Brooks has been looking up all of Harriet Miers' past writings and isn't happy with what he sees:
Of all the words written about Harriet Miers, none are more disturbing than the ones she wrote herself. In the early '90s, while she was president of the Texas bar association, Miers wrote a column called "President's Opinion" for The Texas Bar Journal. It is the largest body of public writing we have from her, and sad to say, the quality of thought and writing doesn't even rise to the level of pedestrian.
Nothing excuses sentences like this: "More and more, the…