Earlier this afternoon, the Senate voted 54-45 to allow D.C. Circuit nominee Caitlan Halligan’s nomination to move forward — which, in the bizarro universe that is the United States Senate, is six votes shy of what she needs. Worse, this happened despite the fact that her opponents could barely even articulate an argument against her.
The case against Halligan essentially boils down to a claim that, because she wrote legal briefs when she was New York’s solicitor general that annoyed the NRA and other conservative interest groups, she must be branded a ultra-liberal and banned from judicial service. If anyone actually took this argument seriously, it would mean that President Bush’s first solicitor general could not serve on the bench because he once defended a campaign finance law, and Bush’s second solicitor general is also too liberal to serve because he won a Supreme Court case that conclusively establishes that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional.
Needless to say, this is not the standard that prevailed when George W. Bush was in the White House. Unlike Halligan, many of Bush’s appointees to the DC Circuit are among the most ideological judicial nominees selected in the last several decades — and yet Bush’s judges nowcontrol nearly half the active judgeships on this important court. Bush’s appointees to the D.C. Circuit include:
The case against Halligan essentially boils down to a claim that, because she wrote legal briefs when she was New York’s solicitor general that annoyed the NRA and other conservative interest groups, she must be branded a ultra-liberal and banned from judicial service. If anyone actually took this argument seriously, it would mean that President Bush’s first solicitor general could not serve on the bench because he once defended a campaign finance law, and Bush’s second solicitor general is also too liberal to serve because he won a Supreme Court case that conclusively establishes that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional.
Needless to say, this is not the standard that prevailed when George W. Bush was in the White House. Unlike Halligan, many of Bush’s appointees to the DC Circuit are among the most ideological judicial nominees selected in the last several decades — and yet Bush’s judges nowcontrol nearly half the active judgeships on this important court. Bush’s appointees to the D.C. Circuit include:
- Chief Justice John Roberts: Before Roberts joined the Supreme Court, he was a George W. Bush appointee to the D.C. Circuit. Roberts, of course, cast the key fifth vote inCitizens United permitting corporations to flood American democracy with unlimited amounts of money. He voted in Caperton v. Massey to allow a wealthy coal CEO to pay $3 million to elect a sympathetic justice to a state supreme court in order to stack that court with jurists who would overturn a $50 million verdict against his company. He’s consistently voted to give corporations a nearly unlimited power to force workers and consumers into a privatized, corporate-run arbitration system that overwhelming favors corporations. And he has been on the vanguard of efforts to give corporations even greater immunity from the law.
- Judge Brett Kavanaugh: Prior to joining the court, Kavanaugh served as an Associate Counsel under Clinton inquisitor Ken Starr, and was a principal author of the Starr Report to Congress on the Monica Lewinsky affair. As a judge, Kavanaugh penned a dissent claiming that Exxon could not be held accountable when it hired people who engaged in torture and other crimes against humanity in Indonesia because, corporations are immune from a law allowing private parties to be sued for some of the most atrocious violations of international law. He also wrote an opinion claiming that presidents have the power to refuse to enforce laws simply by calling them “unconstitutional.”
- Judge Janice Rogers Brown: Brown is one of the judiciary’s most outspoken tenthers. She once compared liberalism to “slavery” and Social Security to a “socialist revolution.”
Senate Republicans saw no reason why these deeply ideological nominees should be kept off the bench when their names were before the Senate, and there is no evidence whatsoever that Halligan is a radical in the vein of Roberts, Kavanaugh or Brown. But, of course, in the era of Mitch McConnell, the only rule that really matters is the rule of obstructionism.
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