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Monday, September 14, 2009

Ind. Courts - Judge David Hamlton's still-pending nomination is focus of New Yorker story

Jeffrey Tobin has a very long article in the upcoming (Sept. 21st) issue of The New Yorker, titled "Bench Press: Are Obama’s judges really liberals?." Some quotes:

The Obama Administration wanted to send a message with the President’s first nomination to a federal court. “There was a real conscious decision to use that first appointment to say, ‘This is a new way of doing things. This is a post-partisan choice,’ ” one White House official involved in the process told me. “Our strategy was to show that our judges could get Republican support.” So on March 17th President Obama nominated David Hamilton, the chief federal district-court judge in Indianapolis, to the Seventh Circuit court of appeals. Hamilton had been vetted with care. After fifteen years of service on the trial bench, he had won the highest rating from the American Bar Association; Richard Lugar, the senior senator from Indiana and a leading Republican, was supportive; and Hamilton’s status as a nephew of Lee Hamilton, a well-respected former local congressman, gave him deep connections. The hope was that Hamilton’s appointment would begin a profound and rapid change in the confirmation process and in the federal judiciary itself. * * *

But then, as the first White House official put it, “Hamilton blew up.” Conservatives seized on a 2005 case, in which Hamilton ruled to strike down the daily invocation at the Indiana legislature because its repeated references to Jesus Christ violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment. Hamilton had also ruled to invalidate a part of Indiana’s abortion law that required women to make two visits to a doctor before undergoing the procedure. In June, Hamilton was approved by the Judiciary Committee on a straight party-line vote, twelve to seven, but his nomination has not yet been brought to the Senate floor. Some Republicans have already vowed a filibuster. (Republican threats of extended debate on nominees can stop the Democratic majority from bringing any of them up for votes.)

“The reaction to Hamilton certainly has given people pause here,” the second White House official said. “If they are going to stop David Hamilton, then who won’t they stop?”

Republicans in the Senate have not allowed a vote on any of the other nominees, either. So far, the only Obama nominee who has been confirmed to a lifetime federal judgeship is Sotomayor. The stalemate provides a revealing glimpse of the environment in Washington. Obama advisers (and Democratic Senate sources) aver that all the nominees, even Hamilton, will be confirmed eventually, but contrary to the President’s early hope the struggle for his judges is likely to be long and contentious. * * *

Last week, after a long delay, [Cass] Sunstein was confirmed as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. Dawn E. Johnsen, another contributor, has been waiting for months for a Senate vote on her nomination as an assistant attorney general. Harold Hongju Koh, who was the dean of Yale Law School and another writer in the collection, was recently confirmed, also after a long delay, as legal adviser to the State Department. The trouble that these outspoken academics have had in winning confirmation for Administration posts offers another augury of major battles ahead if Obama nominates any of them, or anyone like them, for judgeships.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 14, 2009 07:15 AM
Posted to Courts in general | Indiana Courts