President Barack Obama's opposition as a senator to two nominees for a federal appellate court could come back to haunt him if Republicans were to take the same approach to Sonia Sotomayor, a leading GOP senator warned this morning.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), in his opening statement at Sotomayor's confirmation hearing for the Supreme Court, cited Obama's opposition to Janice Rogers Brown and Miguel Estrada when they were nominees for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Hatch expressed dismay that the two nominees faced significant opposition based on their ideology, despite what he describes as otherwise sterling qualifications.
The Senate eventually confirmed Brown to the D.C. Circuit. It did not confirm Estrada, now a partner at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher.
"If a compelling life story, academic and professional excellence, and a top ABA rating make a convincing confirmation case, Miguel Estrada would be a U.S. circuit judge today," Hatch said in his prepared remarks. "He is a brilliant, universally respected lawyer, one of the top Supreme Court practitioners in America. But he was fiercely opposed by groups, and repeatedly filibustered by Democrat senators, the ones who today say these same factors should count in Judge Sotomayor's favor.
"Whether I vote for or against Judge Sotomayor," Hatch added, "it will be by applying the principles I have laid out, not by using such tactics and standards used against these nominees in the past."
Hatch, a former chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is an influential voice on judicial nomination who crossed the aisle to support both of President Bill Clinton's nominees to the Supreme Court. He has not said how he plans to vote on Sotomayor's nomination, even as he criticized the Senate's treatment of Brown and Estrada.
Click here (pdf) for an essay Hatch wrote on judicial nominations for the most recent issue of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy.
Democrats don't want the same rules applied to themselves. That might require them to actually believe what they say. They just want power.
Until Hatch and other Republicans understand this, they will never be fit to be a ruling party.
Greed for power is still greed.
Posted by: mbesse.com | July 13, 2009 at 05:46 PM