ConfirmThem

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

The Wall Street Journal has an editorial today titled, "An ABA Hit Job;
Political payback against a judicial nominee." Take a look at the whole editorial, or at least these parts:

In March 2001, barely two months after taking office and two months before announcing his first judicial nominees, President Bush told the American Bar Association to buzz off. Specifically, Mr. Bush ended the tradition of providing the ABA's Committee on the Federal Judiciary with the names of nominees before they were made public. The ABA would still evaluate candidates for the federal bench, but it would do so from a status more consistent with the role it plays--that of a political interest group.

Too bad Mr. Bush didn't go all the way and cut out the ABA entirely. Instead, the lawyers' lobby retains a special role as the only national organization authorized by the Administration to interview judicial nominees. And when it has given a favorable rating to a Bush nominee, the Administration has been only too happy to shout it from the rooftops.

Enter Michael Wallace. Anyone who still clings to the fiction that the ABA can be counted on to provide professional evaluations of judicial nominees without regard to politics should take a look at the current squabble over Mr. Wallace, whom Mr. Bush has nominated for the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In May the ABA panel rated Mr. Wallace as "unanimously not qualified" for the federal bench....

But here's the real disqualifier: During the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, Mr. Wallace served on the board and then was chairman of the federally funded Legal Services Corporation, whose ostensible mission was to provide legal help for the poor but which was a haven for liberal legal activism.

Mr. Wallace's efforts to reform the LSC had many critics, among them an attorney by the name of Michael Greco. Another opponent was the then-president of the New Hampshire bar, Stephen Tober, who accused him of having a "political agenda" at one particularly contentious hearing. Mr. Greco is now president of the ABA, and Mr. Tober is chairman of the ABA committee that nixed Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace's reforms were adopted, and now it's apparently payback time.

Meanwhile, an email from the Third Branch Conference states:

At 51 confirmations in this Congress, we have 7 more to go before we surpass 1973-74, during the Watergate presidency. And then the Senate will have the fewest confirmations since the Carter administration. Hey, everyone needs a goal.

Look for September to be an especially interesting month, if the logjam doesn't break by then.