ConfirmThem

By AndrewHyman Comments () / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The Washington Times reports about the Boyle nomination:

Last week...Democrats on the Judiciary Committee demanded that Judge Boyle's nomination wait another week and that the Bush administration produce more of his unpublished opinions.... If Democrats mount a filibuster that Republican signers to the deal consider frivolous, then the "nuclear option" to ban judicial filibusters altogether would be back on the table.

Senator Leahy says that these unusual document requests are due to Boyle's reversal rate. However, Senator Graham has said Boyle's reversal rate is below the national average:

Graham, citing the Administrative Office of the Courts, said Boyle's reversal rate was 7.5 percent, which is below the national average of 9.7 percent.

Some Democrats are concerned that treating a Supreme Court nominee the way Democrats have treated circuit court nominees would not go over well with the public:

[S]ome of the Dems' top political players are so far sitting out the impending donnybrook over the courts. "A big fight over judges does not benefit Democrats or the country," says ex-Clinton consigliere Harold Ickes, an architect of the Democrats' 2004 campaign. "We just look like obstructionists."

This is from an interesting article in Business Week.

UPDATE: Boyle has been approved 10-8 by the Judiciary Committee.

UPDATE #2: Judge Boyle has been wrongly accused of bias against African Americans, and details are here. He has also been accused of making recusal errors, but those errors were inadvertent, harmless, and common (details here). Although Judge Boyle is opposed by a few police organizations, their reasons are not very persuasive. Judge Boyle, by the way, has a better-than-average reversal rate, contrary to what some people have charged.