Posts on Judicial Confirmation Network

After the election, we issued a press release noting that Barack Obama had been handed a clear mandate to fill the federal bench with nominees who share his committment to justice and equality:

Looking at yesterday’s results, it’s incontrovertible that the election delivered a sweeping mandate for President-elect Obama to appoint federal judges who are committed to core constitutional values: justice, equality, and opportunity for all. In the election the public rejected the efforts of the right wing to stack the federal courts with ideological jurists like Justices Scalia and Alito often called “strict constructionists.” Rather the public selected now President-elect Obama after his repeated commitment to support compassionate judges who are faithful to the Constitution, its values, its principles and its history ... Exit polling made clear that the Supreme Court was also a winning issue for Obama among voters themselves. Voters who said the Supreme Court was a factor in their votes broke for Obama 53 to 45. Voters who said that the Supreme Court was the most important factor provided Obama an even more lopsided victory — 57 to 41.

Not surprisingly, the Judicial Confirmation Network has a slightly different interpretation based entirely on a handful of cherry-picked state court races:

Americans strongly prefer judges who practice judicial restraint and resist the temptation to rule based on "empathy" or other passions -- that is, to legislate from the bench. Last night's election results must not be misinterpreted as a mandate for judicial activism in our courts. The principles of constitutionally limited government have been a hallmark of our system since our Founding. These results prove that those principles, far from being abandoned, enjoy broad support among the American people.

Seemingly knowing that that lame argument wasn't going to convince anybody, JCN then trotted out a tiny poll conducted by right-wing pundit and pollster Kellyanne Conway as further proof that the public supports their view and, more importantly, declared that the burden of proof is now on Obama and his nominees to show they are qualified to sit on the federal bench and that they will be holding Senators accountable for their votes on his nominees: 

But because candidate Obama announced a dramatic and unprecedented departure from the historic, commonly understood criteria for judicial nominees, he has shifted the burden of proof somewhat: it is now incumbent upon him and his administration, and the nominees themselves, to demonstrate to the American people that they will interpret the Constitution as it is written and not make it up as they go along, based on their own personal views.

Careful scrutiny by the Senate is certainly called for, and all of us can help in that task. We must ourselves scrutinize Obama nominees very carefully, and let the American people know what they are getting. We should view the votes on Obama judges as great opportunities. Far from preventing such votes, we should welcome them. Senators will be accountable for those votes in their home states.

This is especially interesting considering the fact that the JCN's mission is to "support the confirmation of highly qualified individuals to the Supreme Court of the United States [and] ensure that the confirmation process for all judicial nominees is fair and that every nominee sent to the full Senate receives an up or down vote."

Apparently, the "confirmation" part of the Judicial Confirmation Network's name is reserved for Republican-nominated judges only.  So now it looks like the primary focus of the Judicial Confirmation Network will be, paradoxically, to ensure that judicial nominees do not, in fact, get confirmed.

That is how OneNewsNow describes the Judicial Confirmation Network’s last minute messaging regarding the need to elect John McCain in order to save the Supreme Court:

Wendy Long, legal counsel to the JCN, warns that if elected, Senator Barack Obama would appoint ultra-liberal activist judges to the Supreme Court, who would set the pro-family movement back by at least a generation.

"We'd see things like a constitutional right to same-sex 'marriage,' a constitutional right to federal taxpayer funding of abortion. We'd likely see a so-called constitutional right to physician-assisted suicide and to human cloning. [References to God] would come out of the Pledge of Allegiance and perhaps off our currency and every other public place," she explains. "So we may wake up, but it would be too late -- because once Barack Obama has a chance to appoint a majority of a Supreme Court, then decisions like those would be out of the hands of voters for certainly a generation and perhaps longer."

Long does not believe that Obama will nominate anyone to the bench who would be acceptable to the vast majority of mainstream Americans of both major political parties.

You know, I suspect that the “mainstream Americans” in at least one political party would find Obama’s Supreme Court nominees perfectly acceptable.  In fact, the only people who would find them unacceptable would be the phony right-wing “grassroots” organizations that have spent the last eight years working to pack the court with more justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

Just last month I wrote about the Judicial Confirmation Network, a bogus grassroots organization set up by Jay Sekulow to help press for confirmation of President Bush’s judges back in 2005.

As I noted then, the JCN dedicated itself to fighting for the confirmation of the likes of Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown in preparation for confirmation fights over Supreme Court nominees.  True to form, JCN was active in defending both John Roberts and Samuel Alito and ginning up right-wing support for their confirmations.  But then an interesting thing happened:  Samuel Alito was confirmed and the JCN all but ceased to operate.  

From January 21, 2006 when they issued this press release, they issued just a handful of releases over the next two years (8, by our count) until they swung back into action in August.  

And now, with the election gearing up, the JCN is back on the scene announcing a new million dollar ad campaign targeting Barack Obama on the issue of the courts by linking him to Tony Rezko, Jeremiah Wright, and William Ayers:

The Judicial Confirmation Network (JCN) today launched a $1 million first phase of a nationwide grassroots campaign, which includes television ads in national and targeted markets, to raise awareness and recruit activists on the critical issue of the U.S. Supreme Court.

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The text of the ad:

Wendy: With the help of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the Judicial Confirmation Network fought for the nominations of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Sam Alito. The next President may nominate 4 new Justices. So we'd like you to see this....

VO: Choosing the right Justices is critical for America. We don't know who Barack Obama would choose, but we know this: He chose as one of his first financial backers a slumlord now convicted on 16 counts of corruption. Obama chose as an associate a man who helped to bomb the Pentagon and said he "didn't do enough." And Obama chose as his pastor a man who has blamed America for the 9/11 attacks. Obama chose to associate with these men, while voting against these men.

Wendy: Please join the Judicial Confirmation Network. We need a Supreme Court that respects the Constitution and Justices who won't legislate from the bench. Judicial Confirmation Network paid for this message and is responsible for it.

Considering that the JCN had been all but defunct for more than two years while its two employees were busy working on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, it raises the question of just how they managed to raise a million dollars for ads despite seemingly doing no fund raising and only having re-opened their bogus front-group a little over one month ago.

Back when the issue of judicial confirmations was heating up in the Senate, at the center of the Republican efforts to confirm controversial nominees was Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Justice.   As a member of the “Four Horsemen” along with C. Boyden Gray, Edwin Meese III, and Leonard Leo, Sekulow was a inside player in the battle over the “nuclear option” and the confirmations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito. 

Along the way, Sekulow created a new group called The Judicial Confirmation Network that was designed to give the appearance of grassroots support for the efforts:

It was a subtle bit of targeting that dovetailed with another project under way in an office just above the radio studio. That's where Gary A. Marx, head of the grass-roots arm of Mr. Sekulow's campaign, was meeting with a Maine activist ginning up telephone calls, letters and editorials aimed at pushing Ms. Collins into the antifilibuster camp.

In the 2004 campaign, Mr. Marx, 29, was the Bush-Cheney national conservative coalition director who helped organize church-sponsored voter drives in Ohio. In January, Mr. Sekulow invited Mr. Marx to set up the Judicial Confirmation Network in his offices so they could combine forces.

Mr. Sekulow uses his Senate contacts to track the status of the debate and identify wavering lawmakers. While he targets them on the radio or through his regular emails, Mr. Marx follows up with state-based groups that can be important to a senator's political career.

The JCN quickly made a name for itself, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the efforts only to become little more than a shell once the battles were over.  Little was heard from its two employees, Gary Marx and Wendy Long, until both showed up on Mitt Romney’s National Faith and Values Steering Committee and, in the meantime, the JCN essentially went dark, having not even issued a press release since July of 2007.   Until today, that is, when Long resurfaced to attack Barack Obama for his answer during a question at Rick Warren’s faith forum about which Supreme Court judges he would not have nominated:

All this speaks volumes about the kind of judges Obama would appoint, and the way he would fill several potential vacancies at the Supreme Court that could arise during the next President's term in office. Obama wants Justices who will do his bidding, who will implement the preferred policies of the liberal establishment - not Justices like Thomas, Scalia, Roberts and Alito, who understand that the role of a judge is not to legislate from the bench.

But that was apparently enough to get her quoted at length in an article on FoxNews.com:

“Apparently, Obama can do no better than to recycle discredited statements of Harry Reid when it comes to Justice Thomas. Like other liberal elites, Obama cannot stand it when a black man strays from the ideological plantation and refuses to implement liberal policies through the courts. But Obama will never point out any intellectual deficiencies in Justice Thomas’s work, because he can’t. Justice Thomas’s opinions consistently reveal faithfulness to the Constitution, judicial modesty and deference to the will of the people in our representative democracy. That is opposed to everything that Obama and the liberals are trying to do in grabbing power from the people and giving it to the courts,” she said.

It seems as if Gary Marx has managed to pull himself away from his $8,000-a-month position with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign to pen an action alert in his capacity as Executive Director of the Judicial Confirmation Network to urge supporters to contact their senators and demand a vote on the nomination of Leslie Southwick:

The Liberal Left led by Senator Ted Kennedy, Minority Leader Harry Reid, and People for the American Way will stop at nothing in order to keep common sense constitutionalist judges like Leslie Southwick off the bench. Ultimately, their unprecedented judicial filibusters are a backdoor political sabotage to manipulate the Senate rules. Their goal is to create a radical new precedent where for the first time in history a future Supreme Court nominee like Justice Roberts or Alito will be forced to receive 60 votes for confirmation rather than a simple and fair majority vote.

The vote on whether to filibuster Judge Southwick is likely to occur this week ... possibly as early as Wednesday. This is our last chance to make our voice heard. The time to call your Senators' offices is today!

Marx then encourages activists to take the time to read an op-ed penned by his partner at the JCN, Wendy Long - who, like Marx, serves on Romney’s National Faith and Values Steering Committee – in which she trots out the Right’s standard claim that those who raise concerns about Southwick’s judicial record and philosophy are really just calling Southwick a racist:

Just when you thought "white male in the South" didn't equal "presumptive racist," a disgusting spectacle with that familiar theme is unfolding in the United States Senate.

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[Senator Richard] Durbin is doing essentially what [Duke Prosecutor Mike] Nifong and [Al] Sharpton did: attacking someone else as a racist in order to advance his own political agenda. Never mind the facts, never mind the law, just play the race card against a white man in the south and you know you have a good chance to bring him down.

It seems that whenever anyone dares to oppose any of President Bush’s judicial nominees, the Right sees some nefarious ulterior motive at work – and that is how they manage to convince themselves that opposition to Southwick stems not from concerns about his record but from some sort of deep-seeded hatred of Southern white males … the same way they said opposition to Miguel Estrada was really due to anti-Latino prejudice … and opposition to Priscilla Owen was the result of flagrant anti-woman bias … and opposition to William Pryor was actually due to anti-Catholic bigotry … and opposition to Janice Rogers Brown was in actuality rooted in racism.    

Like Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney has unveiled his own "Advisory Committee on the Constitution and the Courts" filled with Federalist Society members and right-wing judicial activists such as Jay Sekulow, Wendy Long, Douglas Kmiec, Bradford Berenson, and James Bopp.

2008 candidate hires Gary Marx from Judicial Confirmation Network and picks up endorsement from right-wing superlawyer Jay Sekulow.

There is nothing the Right loves more than to complain about the issue of judicial nominations.  Back when President Clinton was making nominations, they complained that the Senate was confirming too many and ever since President Bush took office, they’ve been complaining that the Senate isn’t confirming enough.   

On Wednesday, Sen. Patrick Leahy delivered a speech setting out his agenda as incoming chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee in which he touched on the issue of judicial nominations:

For too long, this White House has used judicial nominations for partisan political purposes and refused to work with us on consensus nominees. The American people want the Senate to be more than a rubber stamp. They want the Senate to do its job by carefully evaluating nominees for lifetime judgeships -- judgeships that will continue long after this President leaves office and will affect the rights of today’s Americans and those of their children and grandchildren.

The process starts with the President. In the choices he makes, he can unite the Senate and the American people, or he can divide us. If he works with us to send consensus nominees instead of picking political fights, we can make good progress filling vacancies in these important lifetime appointments. One tangible step we should consider is wider use of bipartisan judicial nominating commissions in screening judicial candidates.

Not surprisingly, the Right jumped on the opportunity to complain about the issue once again, with Fidelis, Concerned Women for America, the Family Research Council, and the Committee for Justice all weighing in to blast Sen. Leahy and the Democrats for their supposed “damaging” of the confirmation process.  

The Judicial Confirmation Network also issued a statement, warning:

Voters in key battleground states in 2008 will be watching these liberal Democrats, to see if they really are fair and how they treat President Bush's nominees to the bench who respect democracy and leave political questions to the American people to decide.

It is funny that the JCN would warn that “voters will be watching” because, back in October, it and several of the other groups mentioned above were desperately trying to get voters to pay attention to this issue by unveiling a “Fair Judiciary Oath” that was circulated to candidates running for the Senate.  By signing, candidates pledged to “work to see that everyone duly nominated to serve on the federal judiciary gets a fair confirmation process.” 

The JCN and the others obviously thought that this oath would provide a way to highlight Democratic “obstruction” during the mid-term elections and mobilize right-wing voters in order to help the GOP retain control of the Senate.  

But it didn’t turn out that way, because only four candidates agreed to sign the oath:  George Allen (VA), Rich Santorum (PA), Jim Talent (MO), and Michael Bouchard (MI). 

And each one lost their race.

“Oath” decries filibusters, delays – don’t tell Sen. Brownback!

Claims it will be a priority for voters come November.