From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:
President Barack Obama isn't giving up in his attempt to hand a federal judgeship to former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler.
Attempt to hand — that's a weird way to put it. The President has the appointment power. There's no way to get federal judges other than by having the President "attempt to hand" out the positions.
For the third time, Obama has sent Butler's name to the U.S. Senate as his nominee to become a federal judge for Wisconsin's Western District, based in Madison, the White House announced Wednesday....
Also renominated Wednesday was Victoria Nourse, a UW law professor the president has tapped for the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago. Nourse would replace Judge Terence Evans, who has moved to senior status.
And here's the Wall Street Journal on the confirmation issue:
Expect little change in the partisan grudge match over court picks, which Chief Justice John Roberts decried as a "recurring problem" in his year-end report Friday. Democrats will continue to control the Senate, which confirms federal judges. In the last Congress, however, judicial nominations were low on Democrats' priority list, disappointing liberal activists who felt the ex-law professor in the White House and his filibuster-resistant Senate majority squandered an opportunity to reshape the federal judiciary.
In contrast, Republicans long have made molding the courts a top objective. As they did in the last Congress, Republicans likely will make up in energy what they lack in numbers, using parliamentary privileges to slow or block Obama nominees.
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10 comments:
The Zero didn't earn his rep as the most partisan member of the Senate for nothing.
Even when, "I Won", became, "I Lost".
Give us the scoop on these colleagues. Were they carrying the Little Red Book in their briefcases?
I'm reading Reading Obama by James Kloppenberg who is in the History department at Harvard. He traces among other things the battles in the law program at Harvard while Obama was a student. He says, "He was a man of the Left" (51).
He also says that Obama was capable of reading conservatives' work and published them in the HLR. He also says that Saul Alinsky was a huge influence on Obama, but he calls Alinsky a pragmatist.
Kloppenberg's book is a pretty good one, and pretty balanced. He presents Obama as a leftist who tries to be open-minded toward the right and tries to understand their viewpoints rather than to simply dismiss them as racist or stupid, as some of his colleagues do. I'm only on p.67.
It's one of the briskest reads I've ever had from a prof. I think it's taken me less than an hour to get to p. 67.
Compare that to Martha Nussbaum, a law prof at U. of Chicago. Her book on Women's Rights the Capabilities Approach required three full days as I had to reread each paragraph to find her point (which are often good, but she thinks polygamy is ok as long as women can do it, too).
I wonder if people in law programs are as crazy as the general population.
Has new Senator Johnson weighed in on whether he supports a Wisconsin person on the Federal Bench? I've not seen anything about that (not that I've looked).
Despite the usual handwringing from the usual suspects, the reason judicial extremists like Butler and Liu got nowhere last time around was Demo reluctance to hold hearings on their nominations. I think Mitch and the boys were saying (and will say this time), "bring it one." A typically cynical move by O.
Thank you President Obama for once again ignoring the will of the people. Wisconsin voters removed Butler from the Wisconsin Supreme Court and they don't want him back as a Federal judge either.
Louis makes a living off of his powerful political allies. He ran for the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2000, but lost. He was then appointed by his Democratic compatriot Governor Jim Doyle. The voters then reinstated their wishes by not re-electing him. And now another Democratic politician (and fellow Chicagoan) wants to force him back on us, even though his nomination has twice been rejected. What part of "no" don't you understand?
Does Obama think Butler isn't qualified to be on the 7th Circuit? He was a Justice on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. That was a good enough credential for W. to nominate Judge Sykes to the 7th Circuit.
Wisconsin voters removed Butler from the Wisconsin Supreme Court and they don't want him back as a Federal judge either.
I don't recall seeing that -- Do you want him to be a Federal Judge -- on the ballot.
If you asked Wisconsin voters if Butler should be a judge, I think the large majority would say I don't care. Unless the alternative was someone from Minnesota, in which case he'd get a thumb's up.
Attempt to hand
But as we learned recently similar "attempts" will be blocked
It's Bush's fault (or someone else from Texas)
Perhaps it's something of a reach to extrapolate to the Federal post, MM, but since Butler lost the only 2 statewide elections he participated in, I don't think it's too far.
And as to your own unsupported assertion... I don't know that a FIB gets the thumbs up over a Mud Duck.
So the democrats have not made imposing judicial activist judges on the citizenry a priority? It's only those darn republicans who are politicizing the judiciary by daring to name judges who seek to issue rulings in accordance with the text of the constitution who are to blame.
Sounds like the same liberal pabulum that says that liberal policies are 'non partisan' but when republicans/conservatives create policies that are not liberal/socialist in nature, they are acting in a purely partisan and/or malicious manner.
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