Judicial Watch

One of the things that Republican politicians start complaining about during election cycles is "lawsuit abuse," the idea that trial lawyers are clogging the judicial system with pointless lawsuits in order to extort money from corporations and other public entities. 

But for some reason, they never seem to complain about groups like Judicial Watch which, asPolitico notes, for many years existed almost solely for the purpose of harassing the Clinton administration, along with the Clintons themselves, and is dusting off its briefs now that Hillary Clinton is poised to become Secretary of State and preparing to get back to its incessant lawsuit-filing roots:

[Last week, Judicial Watch President Tom] Fitton announced his group was considering filing suit to prevent Hillary Clinton’s Foggy Bottom appointment, based on the Ineligibility Clause of the Constitution ... this latest saber-rattling over the secretary of state appointment calls to mind the habits of the [Larry] Klayman era. Thus, the Clinton world collectively took a heavy sigh last week as some Clintonites wondered aloud whether Hillary Clinton’s nomination and the cast of former Bill Clinton staffers in Obama’s White House could breathe new life into Judicial Watch.

...

As the group ponders its latest legal action, it still awaits a pending FEC complaint it filed back in April against the junior New York senator over a fundraising event where Elton John performed. The complaint alleged that John wasn’t permitted to help Clinton raise money because he is not a citizen of the United States. (Fitton notes that his organization had also filed a similar suit against John McCain, after he hosted a fundraising event in London. That case was dismissed.)

Also, last week a Judicial Watch investigator went down to Bill Clinton’s Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., to comb through papers that had been released on account of a Freedom of Information suit. The group expects more papers to be released in the future.

Fitton defends his group against charges that its litigation is excessive and political.

“We don’t file our lawsuits unless we think we’re going to win them and we’re pleased by the attention brought to our lawsuits,” Fitton says.

Jake Siewert, who served as Bill Clinton’s White House press secretary, tells Politico that they "initially underestimated the amount of damage that [Judicial Watch] could do through the press and nuisance lawsuits," which is a lesson I hope that he has imparted to the incoming White House staff, who'll not only have to deal with these Judicial Watch's lawsuits, but seemingly an avalanche of lawsuits from the conspiracy theorists who still refuse to accept that Barack Obama is qualified to become the next president.

As Alan Keyes' running mate, Wiley Drake, tells the OC Weekly, that they intend to make this issue dog the Obama administration "much like the Monica Lewinsky controversy dogged the rest of Bill Clinton’s presidency":

[I think] it will be even more so than the Lewinsky thing. I think it will dog him because one of our attorneys, Gary Kreep [of the United Justice Foundation] said we will do everything we can to fight this battle. If we win this case, we will keep him out of the White House. If we lose, Gary and his committee of lawyers, and many of us are supportive of this, if Mr. Obama is indeed inaugurated, we will file a lawsuit against the inauguration for being illegal and against the chief justice of the Supreme Court for swearing in a usurper. And then, typically on the first day of office, the president signs a bunch of bills. Every bill or document he signs, we will file a separate lawsuit. For every decision he makes, it’s gonna to be tied up in court.

“If you continue to believe that the illegal alien invasion is the biggest threat to America, you will never understand that there is something far more dangerous to our country called the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America,” said Daneen Peterson at a small rally in Washington, D.C. last Friday. Peterson explained that “the overwhelming human tsunami of illegal aliens and MS-13 gang members” will cause “complete anarchy,” which in turn will “allow the shadow government to step forward and visibly take over this country. They will use martial law to install a fascist One World Order, dictatorial government in plain sight instead of operating clandestinely as they do now."

Peterson’s warning is familiar to a significant faction of the anti-immigrant movement, who believe that President Bush, an obscure college professor, and the Council on Foreign Relations are secretly plotting to create a European Union-style government in North America. While the supposedly well-advanced march to a “North American Union,” featuring a new flag and a unified “Amero” currency, has not been taken seriously outside of far-right and nativist web sites and news sources, the theory has had major backing from “Swift Vet” co-author Jerome Corsi, CNN host Lou Dobbs, Phyllis Schlafly, Judicial Watch, Accuracy in Media’s Cliff Kincaid, right-wing news site WorldNetDaily.com, long-shot Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, and the grandfather of right-wing conspiracy-mongering, the John Birch Society.

And while Peterson called the immigration debate a “diversion” from the “North American Union” scheme, many activists see them as of a piece: Rep. Virgil Goode (R-Virginia), who has introduced a resolution to oppose the vaporous plot, has also stated that immigration reform is just the first step: “It will lead us on a path to likely have a North American currency, will further break down the borders between our countries, and it really undermines the concept of the United States of America in favor of something called North America.”

A state legislator from the northern Virginia suburbs has proposed a bill to “forbid religious, charitable or community groups from using state or local government money to intentionally serve illegal immigrants by providing food, shelter, education or other social services,” the AP reports.

Del. Jackson Miller, a Republican recently elected to represent the affluent Washington suburb of Manassas, has made “quality of life” issues his political signature, which for him means combating “overcrowding” (i.e., extended family members) and cracking down on undocumented immigrants looking for work. His campaign website lists “illegal immigration” as his top issue.

Miller said he was inspired to act following the efforts by the town council of the nearby suburb of Herndon to create a day-laborer center, which drew fire from right-wing groups like Judicial Watch and the Herndon Minutemen and was incorporated into the 2005 governor’s race by unsuccessful GOP candidate Jerry Kilgore. Nevertheless, his bill is more reminiscent of a provision proposed by Republicans in the U.S. House last year that would have created criminal penalties for churches that give aid to immigrants without checking their papers first.

As we have noted before, there appears to be something about the issue of judicial nominations that makes the Right take leave of their senses.  

For example, Vision America’s Rick Scarborough frets about the Democratic take-over of the Senate in January but insists that, despite the election results, “the American people elected George W. Bush in 2004 with the expectation that he would keep his campaign promise to nominate judges” who share the Right’s agenda regardless of which party controlled the Senate and is urging him to ignore calls to nominate any sort of “compromise” candidates.

To this end, Scarborough claims

When Clinton was president, there was no talk of compromise candidates. Our 42nd President put hard leftists like Ruth Bader Ginsberg on the bench.

The only thing that can be taken from this ridiculous claim is that Scarborough either doesn’t know or doesn’t care about the facts because, as Senator Orrin Hatch recounted in his autobiography, at a time when Democrats controlled the Senate and he was merely the ranking minority member of the Judiciary Committee, President Clinton still conferred with him when it came to potential nominees for the Supreme Court

Our conversation moved to other potential candidates. I asked whether he had considered Judge Stephen Breyer of the First Circuit Court of Appeals or Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. President Clinton indicated he had heard Breyer’s name but had not thought about Judge Ginsberg.

I indicated I thought they would be confirmed easily. I knew them both and believed that, while liberal, they were highly honest and capable jurists and their confirmation would not embarrass the President. From my perspective, they were far better than the other likely candidates from a liberal Democrat administration.

In the end … he nominated Judge Ginsburg and Judge Breyer a year later, when Harry Blackmun retired from the Court. Both were confirmed with relative ease.

Scarborough is not the only one who seems oblivious to history, no matter how recent. In Human Events, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton writes that

Liberals in the Senate have turned the judicial confirmation process on its head, obstructing the President’s judicial nominees for political reasons. They even resorted to launching judicial filibusters, ignoring the constitutional directive to provide up-or-down votes on all judicial nominees. Why? Not because the nominees were unqualified. But rather because they didn’t like the nominees’ philosophy of judicial restraint.

As we have noted repeatedly, if folks on the Right are really concerned about judicial nominees being denied a vote because one or more senators don’t “like the nominees’ philosophy,” perhaps they can start hounding Sen. Sam Brownback to lift his hold on the nomination of Janet Neff -  a hold that Brownback says is going to continue indefinitely