An Assessment on Clement
First, we know now for sure that it will not be Gonzales. I am fully comfortable with that assessment.
Second, what do we know we know about Clement? We know that Clement had a private meeting at the White House late last week. In fact, the Note is going further and Noting that Clement is the only one to have had a private meeting - so far as anyone has been able to pin down.
Clement is known to be pro-defendant in civil rights cases and is like O’Connor on business issues, which means that conservatives will be pleased with her on those issues. There is no indication that Clement takes an expansive reading of the Commerce Clause and every indication that she does, in fact, take the opposite view.
Sources close to the White House tell me that the pick has been made, but are not giving me the name. Third party sources who would be among the first to know are saying that there is every indication that Clement is the pick. In fact, we are beginning to see conservatives get on board and shift from Edith B. Clement having too thin a papertrail to her being “with us.”
No one knows how Clement would vote on the ultimate issue — is abortion a medical procedure subject to state regulation or a constitutional right. I am told that, with the pressing issues currently headed to the court, i.e. partial birth abortion, parental notification, 24 hour waiting periods, the Solomon Amendment, etc. — conservatives do not need to worry about Clement, they need to worry about Justice Kennedy and whether he will continue heading left.
I have been told by multiple parties that, though we know little about Judge Clement’s leanings on social issues, we should make no mistake that her family background is conservative and that her husband is a “loyal” conservative. Also, I’ve gotten a few emails and phone calls from a few particular people who would know who all say that we should trust the President on this pick. I also know that lawyers in my home state of Louisiana like Clement and do think she is conservative.
We don’t know much else about Edith Clement. What we do know means the President has attempted to address Democratic concerns about replacing O’Connor with someone like O’Connor. We also know that Clement’s background is more conservative than O’Connors. We also know that there is a political calculus on having a photogenic female judge without any harsh statements on file, the record of an enigma, and the family pedigree of a rock solid conservative pass through the Senate without the expenditure of an extrordinary amount of political capital.
Lastly, we know that United flight 1898 and US Airways flight 590, from New Orleans to Reagan National, both landed at 8:59am this morning. We do not know, however, if Edith Brown Clement was on board en route to the United States Supreme Court.
This kind of thing is not reassuring. Has the whiff of Souter about it, it does.
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Interesting.