“With each passing disappointment, people want to make sure this is not just someone who looks conservative, but is virtually guaranteed to be conservative on the bench,” said one veteran of past GOP Supreme Court confirmation fights, Curt Levey of Freedomworks and the Committee for Justice. The desire for a justice who is all but a sure conservative vote also seems to have limited Trump’s list to sitting judges, all with a substantial record of written decisions. Those clos

Harry Reid's recent “nuclear” detonation left many conservatives in high dudgeon over "tyranny of the majority." I recently argued that this contradicts the widely-held view that America is under the thumb of a corrupt bipartisan ruling class, viz.: (a) authoritarian reign by largely leftist oligarchic bureaucratic, judicial and media elite minorities over what President Nixon was once ridiculed for calling the "silent majority"; and (b) illegitimate domination by powerful

My newest piece at the New York Post starts this way: President Obama’s timing could have been better. Only two weeks ago in Texas, at a fundraiser, he bragged about “remaking the courts.” Obama told the audience: “In addition to the Supreme Court, we’ve been able to nominate and confirm judges of extraordinary quality all across the country on federal benches. We’re actually, when it comes to the district court, matching the pace of previous presidents. When it comes to th

The video that runs about an hour is available here. The C-SPAN intro is not completely accurate so you might want to skip the first 30 seconds. I would have rewritten it as this: John Lott talked about his book, Dumbing Down the Courts: How Politics Keeps the Smartest Judges Off the Bench, in which he argues that partisan politicians don’t like to confirm smart judges from the other political party because they’re afraid that smart judges have the ability to influence othe

My piece at Politico starts this way: Think that attending a top university and graduating at the top of the class is the key to your success? Not if you’re headed for a federal judgeship. In fact, today the most accomplished candidates for the bench are the most likely to be rejected. And this phenomenon has only gotten worse with the quality of America’s judges in marked decline. The evidence of so-called dumbing down is striking: Tracking federal judge appointments over t

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way: The Senate Judiciary committee will vote on either Wednesday or Thursday whether to confirm Robert Wilkins, President Obama’s nominee to the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals -- the court often referred to after the Supreme Court as the “second highest court” in the country. President Obama has spared little rhetoric in threatening Republicans should they dare defeat or delay Wilkins’ nomination. When Wilkins was nominat

The announcement that Justice Souter will be stepping down at the end of the term, while not a total shock, certainly focuses the attention

...and they're critical of the alarmism of the Senate Democrats and N.Y. Times editorials, reports the New York Sun. At RedState, "Leon H." observes that the tactic of "Borking" well-qualified nominees like Alito is damaging to the image of the legal profession as well as the courts, and is likely to provoke distaste from much of the bar, conservative or not. (via Taranto)(cross-posted from Point of Law).

Ever since Judge Samuel Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court, the Committee for Justice has been hammering away on the theme that it is