Supreme Court
Is it just me? It seems like the path to the Supreme Court, the highest judicial office of our country, should be a less partisan one. It seems a judge should be nominated for his or her skill in upholding and interpreting the law, and in this case, mostly the Constitution. How then is it that the vote for confirming such a nominee breaks down so evenly along party lines? Am I so much of an idealist to think that judges should be above such party lines? Then again, I've never been very comfortable with the idea of voting for judges on a local level. I'm not surprised by any of today's, or recent, events, just discouraged. Is it just me?
posted by Kootch | 6:41 PM
5 Comments:
Um, no, it's not just you.
Mo, in what way was the conservative commentator referring to the fact that the rules have changed? (I ask, afraid that I already know the answer.)
I agree that it seems as though court nominations are now about one or two, high level PR cases and how it might affect the "Party" vote at some other time, rather than who best can serve to interpret law.
One thing that both Stix and Mo seem to be overlooking here is the reasons behind the nominations. It seems to me that judges are no longer nominated to the Court because of their credentials as much as they are because of their ideology.
While both of the major parties are certainly guilty of that, the nominations of the current war-criminal, er I mean president, are obivously reflective of that fact.
So it no longer matters if the nominee understands the concepts of president and stare decisis or what his/her constituional philosophy is, but what his/her idelogy is. In short, the nomination processes has sadly become another battle ground in the cultural wars.
BTW I once wrote a paper on this topic when Clarance Thomas was nominated to the bench in which I said the same thing then in 7 or 8 pages what I just said in three paragraphs, so this is not really a new phenomena
I don't think any of us are over-looking the reasons for the nominations.
You probably can't entrely avoid politics, in the higher sense of the word, in Supreme Court nominations because the Constitution is inherently open ended, so Justices inevitably fill it in with their politics. I do think that, if candidates are qualified–a vague term most of us can still agree on–they should be confirmed. I haven't paid close attention to the nominations but it seems that both Roberts and Alito are both judicially and politically conservative and they both strike me as men of sufficient character that if there is a clash between their political beliefs and their judicial ones, they will follow the law. I could be wrong; they might be complete hacks, but I don't think so.
The only short test for qualification I can think of is this: if their politics were different would you want them on your side? I would want Roberts and Alito and Scalia and Rehnquist on my side. I would not want Warren Burger on my side. i don't know about Thomas.
I think conservative Presidents get to nominate conservative justices. I would like to have seen more centrist nominees but my Presidential candidate lost. I do think that in the case of someone like Bork who was clearly intellectually qualified to be on the court, you could argue that he had habits of mind that make a good professor but a bad judge, but I can't see how you can vote against Roberts or Alito for any reason accept ideology.
And this may all play out quite differently. If you look at the liberal decisions which created the Miranda warning, which created the right to an abortion, and which decriminalized sodomy prosecutions, you will notice one very interesting fact about all of them: they were all written by Republicans.
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