Lithwick writes "The fight to fill judicial vacancies grows even weirder"
Dahlia Lithwick at Slate writes about President Bush's two new nominees to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit: Steve Matthews and E. Duncan Getchell.
The president opted to casually insult Virginia's two home-state senators by disregarding a list of five bipartisan selections who would have easily been confirmed, sent to the White House last June from Sens. John W. Warner, R, and James Webb, D. Bush picked one candidate who Warner and Webb considered and rejected—and a second who appears to be of the view that what the law needs more of is Rush Limbaugh.
Is it that Bush simply doesn't care about the need for the support of home-state senators in the judicial confirmation process or that he doesn't fully understand that the judiciary committee is no longer under Republican control? Does he hope no one will notice that his judicial picks are as radical today as they were six years ago? The answer, surely, is that Bush is fighting a symbolic war over the courts.
Regarding Steve Matthews, she writes:
As for Getchell:Now, I am certain Mr. Matthews is an able lawyer, and the fact that he has logged no time at all as a judge should not necessarily count against him. But a brief glance at his résumé suggests that Matthews' strongest credentials for this federal appeals court seat include . . . his membership on the board of directors for the Landmark Legal Foundation.
The Landmark Legal Foundation? Wait: Isn't that the outfit run by Mark R. Levin, the man who brought us Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America? The constitutional theory proffered in that book was, as you may recall, that any judge who arrives at a different legal conclusion than Levin or Rush Limbaugh is an "activist" who threatens America with imminent "tyranny." Matthews is thanked by name in Men in Black. Is it a bit strange that Bush's latest judicial nominee was intimately involved in a best-selling book that argues for kneecapping the federal judiciary? . . .
Also championing Matthews is Fred Fielding, counsel to President Bush. Apparently, Matthews and Fielding worked together during Reagan's second term in the mid-1980s. Matthews' online résumé notes that "[a]t Justice, he advised Attorney General Edwin Meese III and President Reagan on the selection of nominees for federal judgeships, and served as special counsel to Attorney General Meese on the Iran-Contra investigation." That certainly rounds out Matthews' résumé, but it doesn't make him an attractive candidate for senators seeking bipartisanship and compromise.
Of course, those same senators who sought bipartisanship and compromise—in this case, Webb and Warner—were themselves rudely smacked upside the head with the president's second nominee, Virginia's E. Duncan Getchell, whom they'd met with but left off their final list.