I’m just back from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of Judge David Hamilton to the Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, which the Republicans on the committee boycotted because they claimed they had not been given sufficient time to prepare for the hearing. In an ironic twist, the hearing was held in a small room off of the Senate floor—the same room that Senator Leahy, the Chair of the Committee, used to continue holding hearings on President Bush’s judicial nominations in the immediate aftermath of September 11th.

As Senator Leahy noted today, the Democrats on the Committee have a better record of pushing through Republican judicial nominees than the Republicans had when they were in charge. Yet today, the Republicans once again were all about trying to delay the process, and we’re now even seeing complaints that the hearing was moved to the Capitol, a move which actually helped accommodate Senators who needed to be on the floor to vote on budget amendments.

In the absence of the Republicans, Senator Leahy ended up asking Judge Hamilton about cases that Senator Specter had identified as potentially problematic – in other words he asked the Republicans questions for them!

David Hamilton is eminently qualified to sit on the Seventh Circuit. We hope the Committee will move his nomination forward when the Senate returns from its upcoming two-week recess.

You should also care about the Supreme Court.

In a setback for environmentalists, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday that federal regulators may consider costs when deciding whether to order the operators of power plants to install protections for fish.

By 6 to 3, the court overturned a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, which had ruled that the Clean Water Act barred the Environmental Protection Agency from engaging in the kind of cost-benefit analysis that it had proposed.

The recent narrow-but-good decision in Massachusetts v. EPA shouldn’t fool anyone into thinking that the Supreme Court is a particularly green institution at the moment, and today’s 6-3 decision (Justice Breyer wrote a concurrence) should be a reminder that the “liberal” wing of the Court is far from uniform. There’s a big difference between a good Justice and a great one, especially when it comes to environmental issues.
 

This Washington Post recently had a story on a second instance of the Obama Department of Justice invoking "state secrets" in an effort to shut down a lawsuit challenging violations by the Bush Administration of individuals' constitutional rights.

The first instance, in February, came in the case of Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen, a suit challenging a company's alleged participation in the rendition of terrorism suspects to countries where they suffered torture. At that time, People For the American Way decried the "blow to our much-needed efforts to restore justice." This time the lawsuit involves allegations by the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation that the federal government used warrantless wiretaps to gather information on the charity's board members and attorneys in violation of their due process and free speech rights.

The Post story reports that in addition to invoking the state secrets privilege to terminate the lawsuit -- thereby denying the charity its day in court -- the Justice Department is also threatening to remove the documents from the district court's custody to keep them out of the hands of the charity's lawyers. No doubt there must be a careful balancing of competing interests in these kinds of cases -- legitimate efforts to protect our nation's security versus holding the government accountable for violations of individuals' constitutional rights. But I must say the balancing that appears to be going on in these instances is making me pretty nervous.

Late last week several leaders of the Right, including Tony Perkins, Edwin Meese, and Alfred Regnery issued a statement opposing the nomination of David Hamilton (currently the Chief Judge of the Southern District of Indiana) to the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.

Among other things the statement recycles the screed working its way through the right wing blogoshpere that treats Hamilton's one-month job as a canvasser for ACORN thirty years ago when he was twenty two as if it constitutes a major portion of his career.  And it repeats the gross mischaracterization of a decision by Hamilton that police shouldn’t be allowed to violate “the privacy and sanctity of family relations” by directing a school social worker to interrogate a nine-year old student to get evidence against her mother.

And, now, for the first time as far as I’m aware, the statement levels charges that Hamilton ruled that prayers to Jesus Christ offered at the beginning of state legislative sessions were impermissible, but that prayers to Allah were not.

Of course, that’s not an accurate reading of Hamilton’s opinion. Rather, he concluded, as the Supreme Court has said, that “any official prayers [must] be inclusive and non-sectarian and not advance one particular religion.” And he found, based on an in-depth analysis of the record, that the official prayers being offered in the Indiana House in fact “repeatedly and consistently” advanced the Christian belief in the divinity of Jesus, and as such, were impermissible. He also said that Muslim prayers that similarly advanced the Muslim faith were also impermissible, but that the one and only instance of a prayer being offered by a Muslim imam “was inclusive and was not identifiable as distinctly Muslim from its content.”

A debate on the merits of judicial nominees is perfectly appropriate. But let’s at least get the facts straight.

The New York Times has a short interview of former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and it’s interesting to see all the topics she doesn’t want to talk about.

Whom did you vote for in the presidential election?

Come on, is this about my Web site?

She dodges a question about Harriet Miers and declines to call herself a feminist, but one thing O’Connor doesn’t hold back on is her desire to see another woman appointed to the Court.

It was better for me when I was joined at the court by a second woman. When I was there alone, there was too much media focus on the one woman, and the minute we got another woman, that changed.

Makes sense.

Diversity on the Court—in all its many forms—was a big topic at our recent Beyond the Sigh of Relief panel. Take a look if you haven’t already.

People For the American Way president Kathryn Kolbert appeared recently on the David Bender Show on Air America to talk about President Obama’s judicial nominees.

Ed Whelan in yesterday's post about Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals nominee David Hamilton bemoans Hamilton's "inventive invocation of substantive due process to suppress evidence of a criminal defendant's possession of cocaine." Sound ominous? Perhaps - if it were true.

Here's the real story.

There were two defendants in this case. The first, the cocaine dealer, was convicted and received a sentence from Judge Hamilton of 188 months. Although Hamilton concluded that the search warrant pursuant to which drugs were found was not based on probable cause, he nonetheless refused to exclude the evidence obtained from the search because the officers conducted the search based on good faith that the warrant was properly issued. The defendant challenged Judge Hamilton's decision on appeal and lost in the Seventh Circuit. No substantive due process suppression of evidence for this defendant.

The second defendant was a girlfriend of the convicted cocaine dealer. She was charged with possession of marijuana and related offenses--but what concerned Judge Hamilton was how the police collected their evidence against her: by using a school social worker to interrogate her nine-year old daughter for, as Judge Hamilton found, the sole purpose of getting the "goods" on her mother.

This offended Judge Hamilton's sense of fundamental fairness and he concluded as such in an extremely carefully-reasoned opinion. He found that this governmental abuse of power violated a core interest at the "foundation of American liberty long protected by constitutional safeguards: the privacy and sanctity of family relations."

The Seventh Circuit didn’t agree with Judge Hamilton’s analysis of the government’s rationale for questioning the defendant’s daughter and the balancing of government interests v. intrusion into familial relations and it so reversed the decision. But this is not exactly the picture of "extremism" painted by Whelan, is it?
 

News reports state that David Hamilton, a federal district court judge in Indiana, will be President Obama’s first judicial nominee. He will apparently be nominated to serve on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

I am just learning about Judge Hamilton. In 2005, according to the New York Times, "he made news by ruling that the legislature was prohibited from beginning its sessions with overtly Christian prayers. The decision drew widespread criticism in the legislature and across the state."

I can only imagine.

The overwhelming majority of Indianans are Christian. I’d venture to guess that very few of them have ever lived in a society where theirs was a minority religion, and where the government officially promoted a religion that condemned theirs. The experience of their lives is one where they are comfortably in the majority.

As a Jew who grew up in conservative Texas, my experience is different. I know how it felt in elementary school when public school teachers imposed their Christianity upon the classroom. Officially-sanctioned Christianity regularly made it clear that I was an outsider in my own society: I did not belong.

That is but one of the many excellent reasons that the Founders wisely adopted the First Amendment’s prohibition of the establishment of religion by government. But it’s the one that first occurred to me as I read about the Indiana legislative prayer case.

It is important that judges as a group reflect the diversity of America, so the bench is filled with jurists with a wide variety of life experiences, ranging from the top to the bottom of the social ladder. But that does not excuse the individual judge from being able to step outside their own life experience and recognize that what is not a problem for them can be a severe problem for someone whose life has been different. That is an essential quality for a judge. It’s what made the Brown v. Board of Education decision so different from Plessey v. Ferguson, even though both cases were decided by all-white Courts. Similarly, it’s what made 1976’s Craig v. Boren (establishing a higher level of scrutiny for legal sex-based classifications) so different from 1872’s Bradwell v. Illinois (upholding the state’s prohibition against women attorneys), even though both cases were decided by an all-male Court.

Perhaps Judge Hamilton’s ability to step outside his own experiences helped him decide the legislative prayer case. Either way, he clearly was willing to enforce the First Amendment and clear Supreme Court precedent in a case where he knew that he would be condemned by many people in his state. He put the law over ideology. That’s another quality needed in a judge.

This is an encouraging first judicial nomination from President Obama.

Great editorial in New York Times this morning recognizing the hypocrisy of Senate Republicans threatening to filibuster President Obama's judicial nominees well before any are named and urging Senator Leahy to let the blue slip process -- under which senators get a way to block judicial nominees from their home state -- die quietly. The editorial very eloquently echoes some of the most important points People For the American Way has been making for weeks, and it is definitely worth reading.

When President George W. Bush was stocking the federal courts with conservative ideologues, Senate Republicans threatened to change the august body's rules if any Democrat dared to try to block his choices, even the least-competent, most-radical ones. Filibustering the president's nominees, they said, would be an outrageous abuse of senatorial privilege.

Now that President Obama is preparing to fill vacancies on federal benches, Republican senators have fired off an intemperate letter threatening -- you got it -- filibusters if Mr. Obama's nominees are not to their liking. Mr. Obama should not let the Republicans' saber-rattling interfere with how he chooses judges.

Read the whole article.

I'm sitting in the Senate Juduciary Committee executive meeting where Senator Leahy confirmed what we had been hearing -- despite the fact that David Ogden's nomination to be Deputy Attorney General was reported out on a vote of 14-5, with three Republicans including the ranking member in support -- the Republican caucus is going to filibuster the nomination on the floor.  All this because Ogden had the temerity while in public practice to stand up for the First Amendment and a woman's right to choose.

Senator Leahy also flagged the absurdity -- which People For noted earlier this week -- that the entire Republican caucus is threatening to filibuster President Obama's judicial nominees even before a single nomination is put forward. Senator Leahy noted that Republicans and their allies may want the President to fail, but that the American people surely do not. For the good of all of us, he said, President Obama needs to succeed. And that certainly means moving the President's nominees through expeditiously.

By the way, the final votes on the nominations of Elena Kagan -- who will be the first woman confirmed as Solicitor General -- and Tom Perrelli -- nominated to be Assistant Attorney General -- were both held up by the Republicans at the last executive meeting. The vote today? 13-3 and either 17-1 or 16-2. (There was some confusion about the last vote - will report back when it's clarified.)
 

UPDATE: So, it looks like the planned filibuster of the Ogden nomination may be losing some steam. Thanks to Senator Leahy for exposing the Republican obstructionism to the light of day. Also, the Committee has clarified the vote on Tom Perrelli's nomination: it was 17-1, with Senator Coburn as the only "no" vote.