Sitetest,
I'm really not trying to play "last word" here, but . . .
You said: "the governor might not fully understand that ultimately, his picks for the top court will be heavily influenced and partially determined in large part by who is on the lower courts."
Explain please . . . I'm really not following you completely.
You said: "In that he doesn't see shaping the courts in Massachusetts as one of the battles worth picking,"
Maybe you were unaware, but he's done a huge job reforming the judicial nominating procedure in MA! The reason he could get through 9 Republicans to only 13 Dems is because he completely reformed the system to make nominations "blind" initially to the committee.
"Romney won praise in the legal community when he replaced regional judicial nominating committees that were viewed as politically tainted with a centralized Judicial Nominating Commission. The commission considers applicants using a ''blind" first phase of the selection process that removes names from applications in an attempt to ensure the candidates will be judged on their merits."
When the Committee has approved of somebody's application based on qualifications without being able to know who they are or their political leanings, they would look pretty silly to backtrack.
Also, I guess you are choosing to "not believe" Romney nor the Democrats on the council when they both say that Romney would eye strict constructionists for higher posts.
The governor said that, so far, he has had few chances to appoint judges to the highest state courts, where his criteria would change to include ''strict construction, judicial philosophy"
"Peter Vickery, one of the Democrats on the Governor's Council, says he believes Romney and Moore would seek far more conservative jurists if a vacancy were to pop up on the Supreme Judicial Court"
Dear Jeff Fuller,
Sorry to take so long to respond. Yesterday was... busy.
"I'm really not trying to play 'last word' here, but . . . "
No, no, don't worry about it. I'm interested in the information you're providing, and appreciate the dialogue.
"You said: 'the governor might not fully understand that ultimately, his picks for the top court will be heavily influenced and partially determined in large part by who is on the lower courts.'
"Explain please . . . I'm really not following you completely."
Often, judges appointed to higher courts have lower court experience. The judges who sit on the lower courts of Massachusetts are part of the pool of judges who might be appointed to appeals courts and to the state's highest court. Thus, in not trying to appoint mostly or all "strict constructionists" to lower courts, a substantial part of the pool for the state's higher courts will not be "strict constructionists."
That will make it more difficult to nominate appropriate candidates to the higher courts.
As well, his efforts to reform the process are largely lost in that he isn't appointing "strict constructionists" to the lower courts.
"Also, I guess you are choosing to 'not believe' Romney nor the Democrats on the council when they both say that Romney would eye strict constructionists for higher posts."
Other than his word, there isn't any reason to believe him. It isn't a part of his history. And as for his word, well, for a long time, he was also a pro-abort, and now he says he's not.
"Peter Vickery, one of the Democrats on the Governor's Council, says he believes Romney and Moore would seek far more conservative jurists if a vacancy were to pop up on the Supreme Judicial Court"
He might. Or not. Part of his difficulty will be twofold:
- He will have narrowed the pool of judges from which he could pick a conservative, because he will have appointed a large number of non-conservatives to the lower courts;
- He will have chosen the wrong time and place to have his battle. The folks who oppose conservative nominees will say stuff like, "Gov. Romney for nearly four years has appointed good mainstream [read: liberal] judges to the lower courts, but now he wants to go backwards and try to appoint this out-of-the-mainstream wild-eyed conservative to our highest court!"
The time to draw the line in the stand was way before making appointments to the higher courts. Truly conservative choices, contrasted with the prior more liberal choices, can easily be painted as "out-of-the-mainstream."
"He studied hard and long the stem-cell/cloning bill and that was when he had the conversion to the importance of legislating/governing in a pro-life manner."
That's part of my problem. He previously described abortion as a "woman's right." To say that studying the stem cell issue caused him now to believe that abortion not only is not a right but should actually be illegal seems to me to be a large shift coming from a small thing. I mean, heck, Jeff, the fact that over 1.2 million people are being killed per year didn't dissuade him but the idea that a hundred or perhaps even a thousand unborn humans would be killed through stem cell research did??
It looks, feels, smell like political opportunism.
I need a better storyline before I can suspend my disbelief.
"P.S. . . . I liked the 'brainwashed' dig. You know your 'Romney's', eh?"
LOL. I couldn't resist. Sorry. ;-)
sitetest