Tag: Kamala Harris

Five Biden appointees advance to confirmation votes

Five of President Biden’s judicial nominees advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday. Two court of appeals nominees, including D.C. Circuit nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, passed on narrow majorities. Three dsitrict court nominees sailed through with large majorities.

Judge Jackson won the support of two Republican Senators, Lindsay Graham and John Cornyn, and passed to the full Senate with a final committee vote of 13-9. That someone as accomplished as Jackson received nine “no” votes is a clear sign of our political dysfunction. Senator Chuck Grassley, who voted against Jackson, explained that “unless a circuit court nominee can show me that he or she is affirmatively committed to the constitution as affirmatively understood, I don’t think that he or she should be confirmed.”

One point to Senator Grassley for honesty, but a three-point deduction for damaging partisanship. Yes, the D.C. Circuit has become the most ideological of the circuit courts, and yes, there is reason for the GOP to be concerned about the Democrats’ transparent effort to pack that court and then funnel all federal elections challenges through it. But elections have consequences, and no one should expect that a Biden nominee will be a committed originalist. Grassley’s bright-line rule for appellate nominees places him squarely in the camp of noted Third Branch emasculators Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono.

A new day and a plea for unity

The Dean of my law school, Scott Brown, has an op-ed up at The Hill calling for unity as the United States inaugurates Joe Biden as its 46th President. It’s an important message. Over the past decade-plus, Americans’ disagreements over policies and protocols have devolved into distrust and outright demonization of their neighbors and countrymen. It is a depressing and dangerous condition, but it is reversible.

I am not naive enough to think that unity will be achieved simply with a change in administration. Donald Trump was a symptom of our dysfunction, not a cause of it. But Inauguration Day provides an excellent opportunity for us to look at ourselves and ask what we really want to be. I hope for an America where people do differ on policies and conceptions of the good life, where we are squabbling and passionate and relentless about our convictions, but also where fealty to the core values of our country — among them free speech, due process, equal protection, and respect for the rule of law — provides the unshakeable foundation for good faith arguments about our future.

Regular readers of this blog know that I have sometimes been hard on Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. I will continue to do so when I disagree with their policies and actions. But I will also give them credit whenever it is merited, and I will always wish them well. They are now steering a ship of 330 million people, and it is in the interest of the country — indeed, the entire world — that they succeed. May they find that success today and in the coming years.

Turley on court packing

Jonathan Turley has been a voice for sanity among legal commentators during the tumultuous past year. His new op-ed at The Hill, which looks at the dangers and irony of Democrats’ court-lacking schemes, continues his tradition of strong and reasonable analysis. A snippet:

For the scheme to pack the Supreme Court proposed by Kamala Harris and others to work, there must be some kind of litmus test. Democrats have pledged to add new justices to ensure a bench that will vote to uphold or overturn cases as desired. Absent such promises, the scheme is a futile exercise. The whole point is to force outcomes like voting to uphold Roe. This rationale has reached truly dystopian levels, with former White House counsel John Dean insisting that, by creating a new ideological majority, Democrats would remove politics from the Supreme Court.

Litmus tests and the idea to pack the bench would not honor Ginsburg. They would instead destroy the Supreme Court she loved. It would obliterate an institution that has preserved the stability and continuity of our country. The Supreme Court has performed this vital role based on its legitimacy and authority with Americans that will evaporate if Democrats conduct litmus tests or pack the bench.

The whole article is well worth the read.

The political calculus: Who WILL be the Supreme Court nominee?

Third in a series of posts about the politics of filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In my last post, I suggested that purely from the standpoint of conventional political strategy, the President should nominate Sixth Circuit Judge Joan Larsen to fill Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. Judge Larsen is reportedly on the short list, so it’s certainly possible.

But we also know that the President’s political instincts rarely align with convention. And if he wants a public fight instead of a better chance of an electoral win, he has other options.

I think he will go with the current consensus front-runner, Amy Coney Barrett. And he’ll do it not because of her qualifications — which are excellent — but because her nomination is likely to create the most short-term political chaos.

Continue reading “The political calculus: Who WILL be the Supreme Court nominee?”

The mortifying state of our Supreme Court confirmation politics

The first of a series of posts about the politics of filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

So here we are, not even five years removed from the embarrassing political melee that followed the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and the same movie is playing out in even more absurd fashion.

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is working the Republican back benches to ensure a yes vote for the President’s Supreme Court nominee — never mind that there is, as of yet, no nominee to vote on. This is the same Senator McConnell who refused to even hold a hearing for then-nominee Merrick Garland in 2016 on the flimsy pretext that it was too late into a election year. To call McConnell’s reversal hypocritical is an insult to hypocrisy.

Remarkably, the Democrats have acquitted themselves even more poorly. After hectoring the American public in 2016 with the smug insistence that the Senate must vote on the Garland nomination (using the Twitter hashtag #DoYourJob), and after four years of accusing the Republicans of “stealing” the seat by not holding a hearing for Garland, the Democrats now declare —with no apparent sense of irony — that they will do everything possible to prevent a vote on the as-yet-unnamed nominee. The charge has been led, most distressingly, by the Democrats’ own Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, who previously pledged to shirk her Senate duties by refusing in advance to vote for any Trump appellate court nominee, and who now promises an extended vacancy crisis in connection with her efforts to raise campaign funds. 

How did we get here? Continue reading “The mortifying state of our Supreme Court confirmation politics”

Another Senator joins the federal judicial nomination Hall of Shame

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) said in an interview that week that “I will vote only for those Supreme Court nominees who have explicitly acknowledged that Roe v. Wade is wrongly decided.” He added, “By explicitly acknowledged, I mean on the record and before they were nominated.” Hawley championed his position as a way of correcting “an unbridled act of judicial imperialism,” the point “at which the modern Supreme Court felt it no longer had to follow the Constitution.”

Hawley is of course entitled to his views on the abortion debate, but his explicit refusal to vote for anyone who does not pass his narrow litmus test represents a direct assault on the Third Branch of government. The percentage of the Supreme Court’s cases concerning abortion are miniscule compared to the wide range of other matters it hears — matters that evidently are of no moment to Senator Hawley. Whether he is fully sincere in his pledge, or just making a political play, his ex ante refusal to even consider qualified nominees for the Court is a wholesale deriliction of his duty as a United States Senator.

Sadly, Hawley is not alone. This blog has taken to task Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) for her equally repugnant vow not to vote for any of the President’s nominees, and Senator Mazie Hirono (D-HI) for her inappropriate questioning of judicial nominees.

Harris in particular has ambitions for a national political role. But such open hostility to the judiciary, and the readiness to treat a co-equal branch of government as a political plaything, should disqualify Hawley, Harris, and Hirono from any further national office.

Growing dockets, many vacancies in the federal courts

I have a new op-ed in The Hill, noting the unfortunate conflation of growth in federal case filing, the mass of ongoing judicial vacancies, and ugly partisanship in the judicial confirmation process. Key grafs:

These partisan inquisitions are embarrassing and wholly unnecessary. The vast majority of federal cases do not raise political questions. Whether a contract was breached or a patent infringed is neither a matter of liberal or conservative ideology nor one of broad significance. By contrast, the ongoing vacancies crisis in the courts is a matter of national concern. For private litigants, a shortage of judges means longer waits for trials and orders, and increased financial and emotional cost on clients resulting from the delays. For the general public, fewer judges means a justice system that is less efficient, less transparent, and even less trustworthy.

Just imagine if other important civic institutions such as police and fire services, churches and synagogues, and schools and hospitals had to rely entirely on politicians to meet their staffing needs. Imagine if the career of a promising doctor, teacher, or firefighter depended not on her relevant skills and experience, but whether she belonged to the right kind of civic organization or took the wrong stand on an issue in college. What kind of applicants would seek those jobs and run that gauntlet? What quality of employee would it ultimately produce? How long could people endure all the resulting delays and inefficiencies before it became too unbearable?

Please read the whole thing!

Kamala Harris doesn’t care about the judiciary

That’s the only reasonable interpretation of her stunning announcement that she will preemptively oppose any federal appellate court nominee put forth by President Trump. This is naked politics in its worst form: in an effort to score points with her political base and show off her willingness to resist the President, she is ready to deprive an entire branch of government the basic resources it needs to operate.

One might conclude that it’s all sound and fury, given that the Republicans control the Senate, and Harris’s Judiciary Committee vote will rarely be dispositive. But what an ugly precedent it sets. Should the junior senator from California succeed in her presidential aspirations, she will have set the stage for others to reject her own nominees sight unseen.

And of course, the judiciary is the body that truly suffers from this silly posturing. There are currently twelve vacancies on the federal circuit courts of appeal, half of which are on Harris’s home circuit, the Ninth Circuit. Those vacancies put pressure on the remaining judges to process heavy dockets with inadequate resources, leading to worse outcomes for criminal defendants, civil litigants, and the entire court system.

Senator Mitch McConnell was rightly criticized for failing to schedule a vote on the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court in 2016. That was ugly power politics, and this is no different. Democrats should reject unequivocally Senator Harris’s absurd and counterproductive policy.

Mazie Hirono is wrong, and she’s playing right into Donald Trump’s hands

My latest post at the New England Faculty Blog explains why the efforts of Senate Democrats to grill judicial nominees on their religious beliefs is both wrong as a matter of course, and a strategic blunder that the President is ready to exploit.