Posted on 06/17/2007 8:25:27 AM PDT by Clintonfatigued
President Bush has rebuffed a Democratic suggestion that he withdraw one of his appellate court nominations, despite the certainty that the Senate Judiciary Committee will reject the nomination.
The standoff is rekindling partisan battles over judicial nominations, which died down after a group of senators struck a deal two years ago to avoid a parliamentary showdown over the issue.
Now, however, with Democrats in charge of the Senate and less than two years left in his presidency, Bush has little leverage to move through the Senate nominees who face serious opposition.
(Excerpt) Read more at public.cq.com ...
If Bush were to push on this instead of that destructive amnesty bill, he would be doing better in the polls.
Not really much he can do about it unless McConnell is willing to push Harry Reid on these nominations.
Elections sure do have consequences.
“Mississippi has never had an African-American on the circuit even though it has the largest African-American population of any state,” Leahy said.
Wide open, full frontal, in your face racism from the rats.
Disgusting.
Very unfortunate. He's used up his politcal capitol because of his magnificent obsession on amnesty. His support on Iraq will also suffer because of the fallout on amnesty. He's played all the wrong cards, his chips are gone, and he's pretty much out of the game.
It will be fascinating some day to find out who his ring of intimate advisors have been these past couple of years. Rove is the public one, but who else in the shadows has contributed to his tragic downfalling is intriguing to me.
Leni
One serious problem with Bush’s second term district and appellate court nominations is that somehow he manages a way to put up mediocre lawyers who are academically undisdinguished, manifestly partisan and, in several instances, committed to a predisposed outcome in specific type cases. While admittedly hearsay, but from sources I would trust, comes a report that his selection committee exacts a personal promise from potential nominees that in certain types of cases yet to come before the court, the nominee will favor the administration’s perspective of the preferred outcome. Like the polititization of U.S. attornies, who are supposed to be the voice of a fair and impartial justice system, such a practice contains the foundation for destroying the public trust in the objectivity and impartiality of the judicial process. If true, that is a very disturbing concept and should be exposed and strongly opposed.
Is this like a whisper campaign? — “Its from sources I would trust”.
You trolling this morning?
Bush really has blown it.
Democratic presidents appoint liberal, activist judges and Republican presidents appoint (or at least are expected by those who vote for them to appoint) conservative or moderate judges.
US Attorneys are a part of the executive branch. The executive branch is run by the President and reflects the political policies of the President. That’s why we have presidential elections, and one reason why they are so important. It is perfectly appropriate and contemplated by our constitutional system of government that the Justice Department, with its limited resources, set priorities that reflect the the priorities of the President and his administration. If the President’s policy were, for example, to crack down on drug dealers, then we shouldn’t be surprised when federal investigators and prosecutors focuse their resources on drug dealers.
If he is nominating mediocre people, that is a fair criticism.
However, Presidents SHOULD do their homework to ensure that judical nominees reflect the same judicial philosophy as the President who appoints them. The Democrats have been more successful than the Republicans at this, IMO. What happens when Presidents do NOT do their homework to determine that a nominee shares the same judicial philosophy as the President, is appointments like Justice Souter, who has been a disaster as far as conservatives are concerned.
IMO you are confusing the perfectly appropriate and constitutionally-contemplated right of the President to appoint judges who support his judicial philosophy and prosecutors who support his political policy priorities with the constitutional requirement that all citizens are entitled to equal protection under the law. They are two very different concepts.
While admittedly hearsay, but from sources I would trust, comes a report that his selection committee exacts a personal promise from potential nominees that in certain types of cases yet to come before the court, the nominee will favor the administration’s perspective of the preferred outcome.
The government is run by career bureaucrats who outmaneuver or outlast elected officials and their appointed "heads". At this point the president is totally crippled and everyone is positioning themselves for the next administration.
A big disappointment has been the failure of Bush, in 8 years no less, to make any real effort to clean out the career liberals at Justice, State and CIA in particular. Thus we get things like the Scooter Libby persecution and the constant stream of leaks out of CIA undermining the administration.
Oh, please. Appointments at that level have always been political. Bush’s big error, in fact, was that he refused to see this at the start. In the case of the attorneys, for example, he left them in place and they had years to do their Clinton dirty work before he began to remove them; Clinton, on the other hand, fired all the attorneys the day he took office and replaced them with his own politically agreeable appointments.
You appear to have joined to post some odd stuff, all of it coming from your “confidential sources,” judging by another post I saw by you on another thread. What’s up?
Appointments in the Justice Department are expected to be political. Where Bush has gone astray is his failure to hose out stinking leftovers from the Clinton administration, and his tendency to appoint people who are less than competent. The problem with Gonzalez is NOT that he is too conservative. Rather the reverse, he is not conservative enough. And he is incompetent, incapable of doing the job as it should have been done.
Janet Reno was not exactly a major genius, but at least she understood who she was working for—the president who appointed her.
Don’t forget that when the GOP had a majority in the Senate, John McCain, Lindsey Graham and the “14 Gangsters” tied Bush’s nominations up in knots.
The elections are the only thing to blame.
“In the case of the attorneys, for example, he left them in place and they had years to do their Clinton dirty work before he began to remove them;.......”
If you’re referring to the recent uproar about the firing of the eight federal prosecutors, they were all GWB appointees from his first term.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,21382586-2703,00.html
“The eight federal prosecutors, all Republican appointees, were sacked unexpectedly last year by the Justice Department. The official explanation was that they were fired for poor performance and it was part of a routine personnel matter.” Paragraph 7
Oh, perhaps you’re talking about other Clinton lawyers in the justice department, in which case you’re certainly right. They have had time to cause considerable trouble in the years that they have been left in place.
Very true. And she would have thrown herself off a cliff before letting Billy go down in the dust. That was precisely what kept a manifestly incompetent person such as Janet Reno in office.
Gonzalez is weak and incompetent, but Bush seems to favor people like that because they don't threaten the Dems. I like Bush, but I think his biggest weakness is that he has been reluctant - heck, he's refused - to take on the Dems and rarely supports people in his Administration who do.
Yes, I meant the other attorneys. Bush should simply have done an overall replacement when he took office. But he didn’t do that anywhere, in any part of the government. IIRC, he was trying to set the famous “new tone,” which meant doing anything the Dems wanted.
No Dem would have done that had Gore somehow won the case (an impossibility, since he didn’t have the votes), but the point is that Bush began to undermine himself from the start and for some reason has never deviated from that suicidal course.
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