Posted on 05/22/2009 7:30:39 AM PDT by GOP_Lady
The vice president can't complain if Republicans object to Obama's Supreme Court nominee.
Vice President Joe Biden is widely praised for the expertise he brings in helping Barack Obama choose a replacement for retiring Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Having served for three decades on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he is considered an asset both for his relationships with committee members and his familiarity with the nuts and bolts of judicial nominations. So let's have a look at how the confirmation process actually fared under Mr. Biden's leadership.
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mr. Biden was present for the nomination and confirmation of every currently sitting Supreme Court justice except for John Paul Stevens. In 1986, the year before Mr. Biden took over as committee chairman, Antonin Scalia was approved by the Senate in a vote of 98-0. Then came Robert Bork and a presidential election.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
If anyone read that and understood it, I would love a summary. I found it to be written as if I already had an understanding of the history of who was nominated and when. I got totally lost as to why Biden is a threat now and am still not clear as to know if Bork was nominated or suggested.
Bork would have been a good USSC Justice.
Yes, Bork was nominated. The hearings were just awful. They brutalized the man. He was completely blindsided.
Biden is the one who mostly put together the strategy to utterly demonize a nominee for deviating from some pretend “norm” of thought. It’s been downhill ever since.
I guess if anyone knows about back alley abortions, it is Ted Kennedy.
I don’t know if Biden the Slow actually wrecked the process, but he did make it rather tedious with his 75-minute questions.
No he just drives them off a bridge.
“I guess if anyone knows about back alley abortions, it is Ted Kennedy.”
Yeah, unfortunately, Killer Ted survived his.
“The Democrats treated the Bork confirmation hearing as a political process and the Republicans treated it as a confirmation hearing, which is why they lost.”
- Ambassador John Bolton
Very interesting. That may be.
I Hear [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
decent rumors that U.S. marshals have been assigned to Diane Wood.
You know this is bad when Ed Whelan writes, as he did in Part 1 of his series on her:
I’ll ... highlight Wood’s plain defiance of the Supreme Court’s initial order of reversal and her resort to a legal argument so flimsy that that the Court unanimously rejected it.
Supreme Court Candidate Diane Wood [Ed Whelan]
Kathryn: I’d be wary of reading too much into rumors that U.S. marshals have been assigned to Seventh Circuit judge, and Supreme Court candidate, Diane Wood. But since you’ve kindly highlighted my posts on Wood, let me offer this summary:
Wood is a hard-left judicial activist and aggressor on culture-war issues:
· Wood is clearly ready to invent a constitutional right to same-sex marriage: “The right not to have the State prescribe a set of acceptable spouses, in the absence of the kind of powerful reason it would have for incest laws or laws designed to protect children, is implicit in the concept of liberty.” (Wood, “Reflections on the Judicial Oath” (8 Green Bag 2d 177, 184 (2005).)
· Wood evidently believes that the inclusion of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Establishment Clause and that a Supreme Court ruling permitting that phrase would “announce that the United States is a nation that has adopted monotheism as its official state dogma.” (See my Part 5 post, point 3 here.)
· Wood believes that it’s proper for the Supreme Court to revise the meaning of constitutional provisions to reflect contemporary international and foreign practices. (See my Part 5 post, point 2.) As Harold Koh’s transnationalism shows, that approach threatens cherished First Amendment rights of free speech and religion at the same time that it leads to the invention of new rights that entrench the agenda of international leftist elites.
· No judge whom I’m aware of is more extreme than Wood on abortion. Her defiance of the Supreme Court’s mandate in NOW v. Scheidler (and her incurring successive 8-1 and 8-0 reversals by the Court) ought alone to be disqualifying. In addition, Wood has (in dissent) voted to strike down state laws banning partial-birth abortion and (again in dissent) voted to strike down an Indiana informed-consent law that was in all material respects identical to the law upheld by the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Wood is aggressive in pursuing her ideological agenda. Her willful lawlessness on remand in NOW v. Scheidler is the starkest example. But consider also her behavior at oral argument in a case presenting the question whether a law school violated the rights of a Christian Legal Society chapter by revoking its official status as a student organization because of the chapter’s membership policies. Wood viciously maintained that the CLS chapter viewed homosexuals as “less than fully human,” conspicuously turned her back on CLS counsel as he explained CLS’s orthodox Christian beliefs, and turned back around to exclaim “Goodness!”
In his Notre Dame speech last week, President Obama encouraged “fair-minded words” and opposed “reducing those with differing views to caricature.” That’s hardly what Wood’s conduct in the CLS case demonstrates.
More broadly, President Obama says that he wants to find “common ground” on abortion and other culture-war issues, and he says that he opposes same-sex marriage. If so, he wouldn’t nominate Diane Wood to the Supreme Court.
Wow, she sounds like a doozie.
And far from judicial material. It is pretty horrifying that she is on ANY court.
Before Bork, pretty much anyone who was nominated by a sitting president would be confirmed. The Advise and consent part in the Senate was merely to determine if the nominee would be fit to be a judge. Starting with Bork, the 'rats began to question where the judges stood on certain issues. If they didn't agree with the judge's stance, they'd vote 'no' against the nominee.
This is how we got stuck with Souter. Bush 41 nominated someone who would not reveal what his future opinions would be, so even the 'rats voted for him. Unfortunately, even Bush did not know where Souter would stand either, and he turned out to be a big leftist.
The 'rats hit a snag with Clarence Thomas. After lib Thurgood Marshall died, Bush picked a black man to succeed him, because everybody felt that Marshall's seat "must be reserved for a black man". So, Bush picks Clarence Thomas. Even though the libs did not want Thomas because they considered him conservative, they were too gutless to "Bork" him, for fear of having their own race card thrown at them. So, they concocted the ridiculous Anita Hill BS story to attempt to discredit Thomas. Fortunately, it did not work, and Thomas squeaked in.
Biden led the 'rats down the road to dishonor from Bork onwards.
Bork’s denial had nothing to do with his qualifications, it had to do with his involvement in the Saturday Night Massacre. All that stuff about renting weird videos was bullsheet. That vote was about payback.
Funny how the libs never forget an offense, and pursue the offender all the way to the grave and beyond. Nixon implemented many of their pet plans, but none of that could make up for Alger Hiss in their eyes.
Meanwhile, so-called conservatives seem not to notice liberal offenses even as they happen, much less remember them for 10 minutes.
Thanks!
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