Judicial Selection During the Bush Administration
Few policies epitomize the take-no-prisoners, ideologically-driven agenda of George W. Bush's administration more than its judicial selection program. For the past six years, the White House has stubbornly spurned bipartisanship to nominate a number of individuals whose ltraconservative views threaten to undermine established law and undercut vital legal safeguards.
This is particularly true of the president's appointments to the influential higher courts. The president's controversial nominees – men and women like Samuel Alito (Supreme Court), William Pryor (Eleventh Circuit) and Janice Rogers Brown (D.C. Circuit) – share a vision of the law that would give the government less power to protect and more power to intrude. Based on their prior records, these nominees promised to curb Congress's ability to enact the worker, consumer, civil rights and environmental protections that make the nation safer, cleaner and more fair. They promised to legitimize the exercise of nearly unfettered executive power. They lacked any record of support for a woman's right to choose. Indeed they promised to sharply curtail the courts' indispensable authority to enforce many of the rights guaranteed by both the Constitution and federal law.
The fact that the Bush administration has nominated individuals who hold such genuinely transformative views should come as no surprise. For a generation, the movement conservatives who now comprise the president's political base have waged a coordinated campaign to remake the law by remaking the courts. Indeed, former Attorney General Edwin Meese counseled in 1988 that "the values and philosophies of the men and women who populate … the federal judiciary" are among the "few factors … critical to determining the course of the nation." President Bush has embraced Mr. Meese's outlook. And aided for the past four years by a pliant Republican majority in the Senate, he has successfully advanced the Right's long-running courtpacking goals.
While pushing for the confirmation of controversial nominees has certainly been a matter of policy for movement conservatives within the Bush administration, it has also been – perhaps to an even greater extent – a matter of raw, partisan politics. Under the guidance of Karl Rove, the White House has used its judicial selection practices to curry favor with the hard-line elements of the Republican base, a base for which the judiciary is "perhaps the single issue dearest to [its] heart," according to National Review contributor Byron York.2 On the one hand, the administration has allowed conservative activists to wield substantial influence over the judgepicking process. On the other, it has deliberately chosen and provoked fights over divisive nominees in order to fire up its most reliable supporters. The White House and its Senate allies pursued this strategy in 2002 and 2004, and there were numerous high-profile calls for them to do so again in 2006.
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