This week's blog features an Earthjustice guest, Glenn Sugameli. Glenn is the Senior Legislative Counsel in our , office, and heads our project, Judging the Environment.
Some quick background: During his term, President Bush has routinely pushed extreme nominees for lifetime judicial appointments to the federal bench. He has consistently ignored the advise-and-consent role of the Senate and pandered to his conservative base. At a morning meeting followed by a press conference at the White House in early February, Bush reignited the fire by calling upon the Senate to approve radical judicial nominees. More from Glenn:
Senators must Just Say No to President Bush’s unilateral, extreme nominations for lifetime judgeships
By Glenn Sugameli, Senior Legislative Counsel with Earthjustice and head of Judging the Environment
President Bush repeatedly has gone out of his way to antagonize Republican and Democratic senators who take their Constitutional “advise and consent” role seriously. In July 2007, The Richmond Times-Dispatch’s conservative editorial board opined that President Bush’s unsuccessful nomination of Jim Haynes to a seat on the 4th Circuit was opposed by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and “seemed deliberately provocative.”
Bush’s pattern is long-standing. For example, two Circuit seats remain vacant. Sens. Debbie Stabenow and Carl Levin, both D-Mich. "have said since 2001 that we wanted to work with the White House on recommending and giving input on judicial nominations, but they've chosen not to work with us," Stabenow said. . . . "It's about the process."
Bush is unnecessarily antagonizing home-state Senators from six states by refusing to discuss appellate nominees and nominating those he knows they oppose. For example, Virginia Republican Senator John Warner and Democratic Senator Jim Webb interviewed more than a dozen candidates for two Virginia 4th Circuit vacancies and jointly recommended a Bush district court judge and four others. Bush ensured a continuing vacancy by nominating E. Duncan Getchell, whom they had interviewed and rejected. After he was nominated, Getchell was named in $7.5 million defamation suit by another lawyer, who alleged that Getchell, so as not to "doom his judicial aspirations," shifted blame for the Virginia Supreme Court’s dismissal of an appeal because trial transcripts were not filed on time.
On January 18, Getchell finally withdrew while his American Bar Association rating was still pending. This created a wasted opportunity to fill two seats; there are now no nominees for the Virginia 4th Circuit seats.
President Bush refused to discuss home-state Republican Sen. Lincoln Chafee’s recommendation for the only 1st Circuit seat state Supreme Court Justice Robert Flanders, who would have been supported by Sen. Jack Reed and by Chafee’s successor, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse. Bush then refused to consult with Reed and Whitehouse before he nominated trial Judge William E. Smith.
Maryland’s senators indicated that they could support filling another 4th Circuit seat with any of the state’s eight Republican federal district judges, including three nominated by Bush. As The Baltimore Suneditorialized, Bush’s subsequent choice of Rod J. Rosenstein “seems primarily intended as a poke in the eye to ’s two senators” who had publicly said that Rosenstein lacked the requisite deep roots in the state’s legal community.
New Jersey’s senators were victims of a bait-and-switch. After they agreed to Bush’s initial choice for Sam Alito’s 3rd Circuit seat, the actual nominee was announced before they were even informed, “ostensibly because [Shalom] Stone is a political conservative who is affiliated with The Federalist Society.”