Quote:
Originally Posted by Yssup Rider
Give him what?
Typing lessons?
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when Reid pulled this you were singing "Glory Hallelujah!". now what ya singing? the blues because Mitch paid back the "favor"?
Obama was a second term lame turd who had a piss poor record of nominations to the federal bench so Reid had to cook up this stunt to get around it.
here's the reason Reid had to go "nuke"
Ratings Shrink President’s List for Judgeships
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/u...udgeships.html
Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, shown last week, has criticized the American Bar Association.Credit...Stephen Crowley/The New York Times
By
Charlie Savage
Nov. 22, 2011
WASHINGTON — The American Bar Association has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees “not qualified,” slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships — and nearly all of the prospects given poor ratings were women or members of a minority group, according to interviews.
The White House has chosen not to nominate any person the bar association deemed unqualified, so their identities and negative ratings have not been made public. But the association’s judicial vetting committee has opposed 14 of the roughly 185 potential nominees the administration asked it to evaluate, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The number of Obama prospects deemed “not qualified” already exceeds the total number opposed by the group during the eight-year administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; the rejection rate is more than three and a half times as high as it was under either of the previous two presidencies, documents and interviews show.
That outcome has added a new twist to a long-running friction in the politics of judicial nominations. During recent Republican administrations, conservatives have
made political hay of
accusing the A.B.A. of liberal bias against conservative potential judges. In 2001,
Mr. Bush stopped sending the group names of prospects before he selected them, so the panel instead rated them after their nomination. In 2009,
Mr. Obama restored the panel’s role in the prenomination selection process, which dates to the Eisenhower administration.
Administration officials are perplexed about the reasons for some of the low ratings, and in discussions with bar panel leaders, they have expressed growing frustrations, people familiar with those conversations said. In particular, they have questioned whether the panelists — many of whom are litigators — place too much value on courtroom experience at the expense of lawyers who pursued career paths less likely to involve trials, like government lawyers and law professors.
Mr. Obama has made it a policy goal to diversify the bench in terms of race, gender and life experiences. Many of his other female and minority prospects received favorable bar group ratings and went on to be nominated and confirmed;
the judges he has appointed have been more likely to be women or minorities than those of any previous president.
In response to questions about the ratings, Mr. Obama’s White House counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, said in a statement that the administration “continues to have a strong working relationship with the A.B.A.”
But she also acknowledged disagreements with some of its ratings.
“Although we may not agree with all of their ratings,” Ms. Ruemmler said, “we respect and value their historical role in evaluating judicial candidates. The president remains committed to addressing the judicial vacancy crisis with urgency and with qualified candidates who bring a diverse range of experience to the bench.”
The chairman since August of the bar association’s vetting committee,
Allan J. Joseph, would not confirm any negative ratings but defended the panel’s work as fair-minded and independent. Its members, he said, are all volunteers who, as a matter of public service, put in long hours reading candidates’ writings and conducting confidential interviews about them with dozens of judges and lawyers.
“We are not a rubber stamp,” he said. “Our role is to provide the only peer review in the whole process, and we think that is valuable — particularly with a lifetime appointment under consideration.”
Still, the demographic composition of the 14 prospects opposed by the panel has proved to be awkward. A person familiar with the ratings said nine are women — five of whom are white, two black, and two Hispanic. Of the five men, one is white, two are black, and two are Hispanic.
The bar association is also said to have deemed at least two other potential minority or female judicial nominees “not qualified,” but upgraded them to “qualified” after the White House asked it to take a second look.
Sheldon Goldman, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who studies judicial selection, noted that the panel rated as “qualified” or “well qualified” many others among Mr. Obama’s female and minority nominees.
“Their diversity record is unparalleled,” Mr. Goldman said. “If it were turning out that most of the women and minorities they were sending over to the A.B.A. were getting bounced, then you would have a crisis, but that’s not the case at all.”
The 15-person judicial vetting committee is appointed by the bar association’s president, who serves for one year, to fill staggered three-year terms. Typically, the member from the same appeals court circuit as a prospect serves as the “evaluator” — and wields particular influence.
Evaluators read potential nominees’ writings, and conduct confidential interviews with dozens of judges and lawyers about whether the candidates have the experience, temperament and ethics to be good judges; they are not to consider ideology.
They write confidential reports summarizing their research and recommending a rating of “not qualified,” “qualified” or “well qualified” to the full panel, which then votes. In the event of conflicts of interest, evaluators are to recuse themselves. If an evaluator intends to recommend a “not qualified” rating, the White House may ask the head of the panel to appoint a different evaluator to take a second look.
The committee does not disclose its ratings of judicial prospects unless the president goes on to nominate them. In cases where presidents have nominated people who were rated “not qualified,” the panel chairman has traditionally testified about its concerns at their confirmation hearings.
To protect the confidentiality of people interviewed about the candidate, the committee often identifies only general categories of concern. According to a person familiar with the ratings, in discussions with the administration, the panel cited concerns about experience for six of the 14 candidates found “not qualified.” It also cited concerns over temperament for five, competence for three and ethics for three. (Three potential nominees were said to have been criticized as falling short in more than one of those areas.)
All but one of the 14 were being considered as district court judges, and — as is traditional — had been recommended for the Obama administration by members of Congress. One had been identified by the administration and was considered for an appeals court.
Officials of Mr. Obama’s legal team have met several times with the chairman of the bar association panel over the last year to raise concerns over the number of negative ratings, and have raised the possibility that the panel’s emphasis on trial experience may have a disparate impact on female and minority lawyers because they may have been less likely to become litigators.
In April, for example, the panel chairman at the time,
Benjamin H. Hill III of Florida, met at the White House with Mr. Obama’s counsel at the time, Robert Bauer. And in August, the White House lawyer with primary responsibility for judicial selection, Christopher Kang, and the assistant attorney general for legal policy, Christopher Schroeder, traveled to Toronto for discussions with Mr. Joseph at the bar association’s
annual meeting, officials said.
The committee has been more likely to deliver a harsh verdict about Mr. Obama’s prospects than it was during either the Clinton or Bush administrations. It has rejected about 7.5 percent of his prospects, compared with about 2 percent of the potential judges under each of the two previous presidents.
The group gave a “not qualified” rating to seven of the roughly 365 nominees of Mr. Bush that it vetted. An eighth was upgraded to “qualified” after a committee re-evaluation.
Four of Mr. Clinton’s approximately 440 judicial nominees had received a “not qualified” rating. “About five” other prospects were not nominated after receiving similarly poor marks from the bar association panel, recalled Eleanor Acheson, who led the Justice Department office that handled judicial vetting throughout the Clinton administration.
(Rounding out the numbers, Ms. Acheson also said “no more than five” other prospects received acceptable A.B.A. ratings in the Clinton years but did not go forward for other reasons. An Obama official said there had been about three such people in the current administration.)
So far, lawmakers who recommended candidates found “not qualified” by the bar association have not criticized the process publicly. But in February 2010, the Senate Democratic leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, did
criticize the association at a Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for a district court nominee from his state, Gloria Navarro.
At the time, Nevada had no female or Hispanic district court judges. Ms. Navarro, a former public defender and government lawyer, had been endorsed by both Mr. Reid and the state’s Republican senator, John Ensign. But the bar group rated her as merely “qualified” — and a minority of the vetting panel had voted to rate her “not qualified.”
Mr. Reid, who said he thought the association had delivered its tepid rating because she had no prior judicial experience, sharply rejected the notion that Ms. Navarro was not well qualified, saying he was upset that Ms. Navarro “is not rated as high as she should be” and arguing that she “has had experience in the real world of government, the real world of law.”
In May 2010, the Senate voted 98-0 to confirm her.
Let’s give Harry Reid for his help seating Trumps Court
