Giuliani-Appointed Judges Tend to Lean to the Left (50 Dems, 6 Republicans)

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani addresses a Hoover Institution luncheon at the Willard Hotel in Washington DC. (Patrick G. Ryan)

When Rudy Giuliani faces Republicans concerned about his support of gay rights and legal abortion, he reassures them that he is a conservative on the decisions that matter most.

"I would want judges who are strict constructionists because I am," he told South Carolina Republicans last month. "Those are the kinds of justices I would appoint -- Scalia, Alito and Roberts."

But most of Giuliani's judicial appointments during his eight years as mayor of New York were hardly in the model of Chief Justice John Roberts or Samuel Alito -- much less aggressive conservatives in the mold of Antonin Scalia.

A Politico review of the 75 judges Giuliani appointed to three of New York state's lower courts found that Democrats outnumbered Republicans by more than 8 to 1. One of his appointments was an officer of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Judges. Another ruled that the state law banning liquor sales on Sundays was unconstitutional because it was insufficiently secular.

A third, an abortion-rights supporter, later made it to the federal bench in part because New York Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a liberal Democrat, said he liked her ideology.

Cumulatively, Giuilani's record was enough to win applause from people like Kelli Conlin, the head of NARAL Pro-Choice New York, the state's leading abortion-rights group. "They were decent, moderate people," she said.

"I don't think he was looking for someone who was particularly conservative," added Barry Kamins, a Democrat who chaired the panel of the Bar Association of the City of New York, which reviewed Giuliani's appointments. "He picked a variety from both sides of the spectrum. They were qualified, even-tempered, academically strong."

That is the kind of praise that will amount to damnation (not necessarily faint) among some of the people Giuliani will be trying to impress in Washington on Friday, when he addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference. The group is filled with social conservatives, for whom the effort to recast the ideological orientation of the federal judiciary has been a generation-long project. Giuliani already faced a high threshold of skepticism from many of these activists because of his comparatively liberal record on such hot-button issues as abortion rights, tolerance of gays and gun control.

Giuliani's judicial appointments continue to win good reviews in New York legal circles for being what conservatives sometimes say they want: competent lawyers selected with no regard to "litmus tests" on hot-button social issues. Many of these people were in the mode of Giuliani himself: tough-on-crime former prosecutors with reformist streaks and muted ideologies.

"He took it very seriously -- he spent a lot of time with these candidates," recalled Paul Curran, a Republican and former U.S. attorney who chaired Giuliani's Commission on Judicial Nominations. "He was looking for judges who were willing to enforce the laws."

The mayor of New York appoints judges to three of the state's lowest courts, the Criminal Court and Family Court, which deal with lower-grade crimes than the state's Supreme Court, the main trial court and the Civil Court, which deals in relatively small financial disputes.

When Giuliani took office in 1994, he inherited a system of judicial appointments created by one of his predecessors, Ed Koch, and designed to insulate the courts from political influence. Under the system, the mayor appoints members of an independent panel. Aspiring judges apply to the panel, which recommends three candidates for each vacancy. The mayor chooses among the three.

Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney, and top aides who remain close to him, Dennison Young and Michael Hess, reviewed the applications.

Giuliani cast himself in New York not as a conservative (he had actually run on the Liberal Party line) but as a reformer. Though at least 50 of his 75 appointees were registered Democrats (only six were registered Republicans), Giuliani also won praise for, some say, appointing fewer judges with ties to local Democratic politics than his predecessors.

"It was not people coming out of the clubhouses, which is what I'd seen earlier," said Charles Moerdler, a member of the Commission on Judicial Nominations who had served other mayors in the same capacity. "I did not support Rudy (the first time he ran) because he was too conservative for me, so I was very alert to that, but I didn't see any litmus tests on his part," he said.

Giuliani's judges serve across New York's courts, where they're more likely to encounter misdemeanant celebrities -- Boy George and Naomi Campbell have appeared recently in front of his appointees -- than they are to tangle with the Establishment Clause. Some, like a Family Court judge who ruled that an unmarried couple couldn't adopt, would please national conservatives. But many of their occasional forays into jurisprudence would likely make Scalia wince.

Charles Posner, a Brooklyn judge appointed by Giuliani, made the kind of decision that keeps conservatives up nights when he was asked to levy a fine against a shopkeeper, Abdulsam Yafee, who had illegally sold beer at 3:30 a.m. on a Sunday. In an unusual, lengthy 2004 ruling, Posner found that "there is no secular reason why beer cannot be sold on Sunday morning as opposed to any other morning."

Noting that Sunday is only the Christian Sabbath, Posner continued, "Other than this entanglement with religion, there is no rational basis for mandating Sunday as a day of rest as opposed to any other day."

Giuliani was out of office at the time of the decision and, in any case, had no say over his appointees' rulings. His spokeswoman, Maria Comella, declined to comment on the difference between the judges he appointed and those he promises to appoint.

Another Giuliani appointee reached a socially conservative verdict by a means that might not please strict constructionists. Judge Michael Sonberg denied a motion by two Bronx strip-club owners to dismiss prostitution charges against them that were based on dancers' offering "lap dances" to an undercover officer.

Sonberg ruled that the changing "cultural and sexual practices" of the previous two decades permitted him to alter the definition of prostitution.

"Statutory construction cannot remain static while entrepreneurial creativity brings forth heretofore unimagined sexual 'diversions,' " he wrote in a ruling that would have pleased social conservatives while, perhaps, alarming strict constructionists and strippers alike.

More troubling to some of the social conservatives Giuliani is courting, however, would have been Sonberg's other affiliation: When he was appointed in 1995, he was already an officer of the International Association of Lesbian and Gay Judges, a professional group. After his appointment, he became the group's president.

Laboring in the state's lower courts, few of Giuliani's other appointees show signs of ideological leanings. Two, however, were appointed to federal district courts -- one of them, Richard Berman, by President Bill Clinton. The other, Dora Irizarry, was a Bush nominee considered so liberal that Schumer pushed her nomination through.

Irizarry, appointed by Giuliani to the Bronx Criminal Court in 1996, had disclosed that she considers herself "pro-choice" during her 2002 campaign for New York state attorney general. Her appointment to the federal bench was almost derailed when the American Bar Association ruled her "not qualified" on the grounds that as a state judge, she had been "gratuitously rude and abrasive" and "flew off the handle in a rage."

But to Schumer, who led the fight against Bush's appellate judges, Irizarry was a Republican he could live with.

"Temperament is not at the top of my list," Schumer explained at the time, when asked why he supported the former Giuliani appointee. "Ideology is key."

These aren't the views on abortion every bit as radical as NOW?

As mayor, Rudy Giuliani will uphold a woman's right of choice to have an abortion. Giuliani will fund all city programs which provide abortions to insure that no woman is deprived of her right due to an inability to pay. He will oppose reductions in state funding. He will oppose making abortion illegal. New York Times, August 4, 1989

--On Partial Birth Abortion: Mr. Giuliani has said that New York State law should not be changed to outlaw the procedure. New York Times, January 7, 1998

And, why would you believe someone so radically in favor of abortion on demand would nominate anything by leftist judges to the judiciary, especially when that is precisely what he did as mayor of New York (see the Politico article posted here about the type of judges he appointed)?

Instead of quizzing that other fellow, could you please explain or link, please, how the Advisory Committee is appointed?

It is the MAYOR'S advisory committee on the judiciary. The mayor selects the members. He can also refuse any of the judges that are selected by the committee and send it back to the committee to come up with another name. It is obvious that Giuliani did not, as Mayor, prove that he works to appoint conservative, "constructionist" judges. That's why his CampaignSpeak_(tm) promises now ring very hollow to those who know his actual record and who aren't willing to gulp the KoolAid he's passing out.

Link me to your source, please. It's nowhere near like that 2002 to the present (Mayor selects half of the 18 members, others select the rest) and, with respect, strongly doubt that it was "Mayor selects all members" before.

As you've been strongly quizzing and lecturing others in the thread about your expertise on this matter, so I'm sure you'll have the source material handy.

Another ruled that the state law banning liquor sales on Sundays was unconstitutional because it was insufficiently secular.

I agree with ending blue laws of all kinds, but not with the reasoning. Blue laws are simply irrational. If you don't want to buy liquor on Sunday, then don't buy it. But, don't tell me that I can't buy it. I grew up in Pennsylvania when they had blue laws and everything shut down on Sunday. After the blue laws were ended , my mother continued to enforce them on us for a couple of years, and then gave in when she realized that it was easier on her if we were allowed to go to a movie or bowling on Sunday afternoon.

I wish that some of you given to bashing Mr. Guiliani would put his mayoral service in context. He was mayor of New York, not of Dallas. There are no elected Republicans in NYC, and the population of Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens is almost exclusively composed of Democrats. Had he tried to nominate even a majority of Republicans for judgeships in New York, he would have been shot down repeatedly, leaving an already strained judicial system in crisis.

Correct me if I'm mistaken but wasn't he the elected REPUBLICAN mayor of New York. So there was at least one Republican official elected in NYC. If it's an almost exclusively come to elect a Republican mayor? How did they elect the current Republican mayor? If Republican candidates are being elected it's reasonable to conclude there's a Republican (no, not FR true conservative Republican) majority. And yet he couldn't find any qualified Republican judges. I don't believe it. I think he appointed judges based on their judicial philsophy or political value.

I'm no "expert" in this. Never claimed to be. I'm limited, just as you are, to what I find or have found on the Internet. Yes, the Mayor selects most or half of the members of the committee. (I never said he selects "ALL" of the members.) But he has right of refusal to any judicial nominee. Show me how many judicial nominees he sent back because they were not conservative or "constructionist".

You're trying to get those who are skeptical of Rudy's judicial appointing practices to prove something. That's the wrong answer. It is Rudy and the Rudybots' job to convince the skeptics that Rudy can be counted on to appoint good judges. His record isn't consistant with what conservatives want in judicial appointments.

Even if everything claimed about his inability to actually control the judicial nominations was correct, it doesn't help Rudy's case on whether he can be counted on the make the right kind of appointments. Yes, he keeps SAYING words to placate the gullible, but his record doesn't back them up whether he had full control over all of his judicial appointments or not. His record does not make his case.

"What is the population that he had to pick from?"

City Court, District Court, Civil and Criminal Courts of the City of New City of New York, and Housing Court

Voters also elect the judges of the District Courts of Long Island, the City Courts outside New York City, and the Civil Court of the City of New York. Judges of the Criminal Court of the City of New York, as well as the Family Court in New York City, are screened by the Mayor's Advisory Committee on the Judiciary, which submits a list of qualified candidates, from which he makes the appointment. The Mayor also has authority to appointment judges to fill interim vacancies on the New York City Civil Court. Finally, the New York City Housing Court is actually a Part of the New York City Civil Court; the Administrative Judge of the Civil Court appoints its judges.

Source

Rudy took a bastian of liberal corruption, decadence and decay and cleaned it up.... Is everyone here < 20 years old, or just completely ignorant? Do you remember what NYC looked like before RUDY? How you could not go to times square in the middle of the day without being accosted? etc etc etc?

Do you consider the United States a a bastian of liberal corruption, decadence and decay? The result I presume of a 6 year Republican President and a 12 year majority run in Congress.

I corrected myself in post #23: Mayor Bloomberg is a "Republican" in name, sort of. Anywhere else, he would be a Democrat, as he was for most of his life, before he decided to run for mayor. There are also two Republican City Council members in Staten Island, and one in Queens.

Guiliani of course ran as a Republican, and benefited greatly from the utter mess his Democrat predecessor (David Dinkins) had made of the city. He, like Mayor Bloomberg, received many Democrat votes, and given the voter registration in NY, wouldn't have had a prayer without them.

Also, check Labyrinthos' post #60 for an explanation of how little control NYC mayors have over judicial appointments.

But the mayor appoints the advisory committee. I appreciate the fact that these are low level positions that aren't making precedent setting decisions. And a Republican jurist in NYC may not look like one from SC. Still, 50 Dems of 56 does say something about Rudy's judicial leanings.

Apparently there is some vast untapped supply of conservative jurists in NYC. If it was a choice between liberal judges or no judges, I don't see how he had a choice.

Any accomplished attorney is a potential jurist. Are you saying there are no Republican attorneys in the city with the most attorneys in the country?

I'm far from a Rudy-bot (don't like his immigration, Gore-bal warming and gun stances), but with all respect, you seem --

1) to be a devoted Rudy critic (which is your right); AND
2) to have pursued this thread/issue aggressively, BUT ONLY UNTIL someone else pointed out that NYC's mayor has relatively little say over whom (as local, not state) judges he can pick.

At soon as #2 occurred, you back off and say stuff like "it's not my burden" etc. etc. I find it hard not to read that as another way of saying, "OK, ya got me: I can't prove that Rudy picked MORE-liberal judges than he could have."

Here, BTW, is what I found about how it's done since 2002: http://www.nyc.gov/html/acj/downloads/pdf/exec_order_8a.pdf

I misspoke earlier in saying that (in the current system) the mayor picks 9 of EIGHTeen. It's 9 of 19, including the chairman. Again, I don't know how it USED to be, pre-2002 --- whether Bloomberg only made small changes vs. large ones.

You write, "His record isn't consistant with what conservatives want in judicial appointments." I don't understand that statement. One can be for liberal policies **enacted legislatively** (and Rudy surely was for some liberal policies) yet be bitterly opposed to "judicial legislation." Felix Frankfurter comes to mind.

I'm not saying I 100% believe Rudy, mind you; he hurt his "no judicial activism" case by suing gun manufacturers and upholding the "sanctuary" policy aggressively. I just think the picture is more mixed, and less unfavorable to Giuliani, than you are painting.

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