{"id":4088,"date":"2005-04-29T09:32:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-29T13:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/4088.html"},"modified":"2005-04-29T09:32:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-29T13:32:00","slug":"maybe-bush-isnt-familiar-with-their-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/maybe-bush-isnt-familiar-with-their-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Maybe Bush isn’t familiar with their records"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ongoing fight over judicial nominations continues to dominate discussions on the Hill, but Bush only dealt with the issue briefly in last night’s press conference. But when the president did receive a question on it, the response<\/a> was rather odd.<\/p>\n

“I think people are opposing my nominees because they don’t like the judicial philosophy of the people I’ve nominated. Some would like to see judges legislate from the bench. That’s not my view of the proper role of a judge.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s not? The president is sometimes a little slow in keeping up with the news, but he may want to take a moment to review the records of two of his most controversial judicial nominees.<\/p>\n

For example, if Bush is worried about judges “legislating from the bench,” he’ll definitely want to pull the nomination of Priscilla Owen. After all, Alberto Gonzales, Bush\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own attorney general<\/i>, has condemned her for “unconscionable<\/a>” judicial activism.<\/p>\n

During their time together on the Texas Supreme Court, [Gonzalez] repeatedly criticized Pricilla Owen \u00e2\u20ac\u201d another judge that Bush re-nominated \u00e2\u20ac\u201d for ignoring the law. In one case, relating to requirements for minors to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153judicially bypass\u00e2\u20ac? parental consent requirements for abortion, Gonzalez characterized Owen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s narrow view of the statute as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153directly contradicted\u00e2\u20ac? by the legislative history and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153an unconscionable act of judicial activism<\/a>.\u00e2\u20ac? In another case, where Owen would have effectively rewritten the law to protect manufactures of products that cause injury, Gonzales called Owen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s opinion an attempt to \u00e2\u20ac\u0153judicially amend the statute<\/a>.\u00e2\u20ac? Gonzales also joined an opinion that described an Owen\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dissent, which would have allowed certain private land owners to exempt themselves from environmental regulations, as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric.\u00e2\u20ac?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And, as Matt Yglesias noted<\/a>, Janice Rogers Brown will have to go, as well.
\n
\nAs the Alliance for Justice reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Justice Brown\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disdain for government runs so deep that she urges \u00e2\u20ac\u0153conservative\u00e2\u20ac? judges to invalidate legislation that expands the role of government, saying that it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153inevitably transform[s]… a democracy … into a kleptocracy.\u00e2\u20ac? Following her own \u00e2\u20ac\u0153pro-activist\u00e2\u20ac? advice, Justice Brown — always in dissent — uses constitutional provisions or defies the legislature\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s intent to restrict or invalidate laws she doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t like, such as California\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s anti-discrimination statute (which she condemns as protecting only \u00e2\u20ac\u0153narrow\u00e2\u20ac? personal interests), hotel development fees intended to preserve San Francisco\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s affordable housing supply, rent control ordinances, statutory fees for manufacturers that put lead-based products into the stream of commerce, and a false advertising law applied to companies making false claims about their workplace practices to boost sales.<\/p>\n

Justice Brown\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s colleagues on the court have repeatedly remarked on her disrespect for such legislative policy judgments, criticizing her, in different cases, for \u00e2\u20ac\u0153imposing … [a] personal theory of political economy on the people of a democratic state\u00e2\u20ac?; asserting \u00e2\u20ac\u0153such an activist role for the courts\u00e2\u20ac?; \u00e2\u20ac\u0153quarrel[ing]… not with our holding in this case, but with this court\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s previous decision … and, even more fundamentally, with the Legislature itself\u00e2\u20ac?; and \u00e2\u20ac\u0153permit[ting] a court … to reweigh the policy choices that underlay a legislative or quasi-legislative classification or to reevaluate the efficacy of the legislative measure.\u00e2\u20ac?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’ll give the president one thing. When Bush said, “[P]eople are opposing my nominees because they don’t like the judicial philosophy of the people I’ve nominated,” he was absolutely right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The ongoing fight over judicial nominations continues to dominate discussions on the Hill, but Bush only dealt with the issue briefly in last night’s press conference. But when the president did receive a question on it, the response was rather odd. “I think people are opposing my nominees because they don’t like the judicial philosophy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4088","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}