Dawn Johnsen

• Ken Blackwell says Republicans must stop Dawn Johnsen from being confirmed to the Office of Legal Counsel in order to keep her from being nominated to the Supreme Court.
• Rick Santorum is not impressed with the Proposition 8 trial.
• Focus on the Family claims that more than 750,000 people have watched its Tebow video as a result of its Super Bowl ad.
• Mike Huckabee's daily radio commentaries are now being carried by more than 500 stations.
• Grover Norquist endorses John McCain, which is interesting considering that it was McCain's Senate investigation that exposed Norquist's ties to Jack Abramoff.
• Finally, this ironic quote of the day comes from Coral Ridge Ministries' Robert Knight: "Let’s be charitable and assume that Obama is not really obsessed with homosexuality."

Yesterday we noted that Manuel Miranda and his Third Branch Conference (formerly known as the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters) had returned and sent a letter to Republican Senators demanding that they carry out a "traditional filibuster" against Sonia Sotomayor.

Though the letter was signed by more than a hundred right-wing leaders and activists, Miranda is and always has been the leader of these efforts ... and now he's taking his demands one step further:

[I]n an interview with POLITICO, Manuel Miranda – who orchestrated the letter – went much farther, saying that Mitch McConnell should “consider resigning” as Senate minority leader if he can’t take a harder line on President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.

Miranda accused McConnell of being “limp-wristed” and “a little bit tone deaf” when it comes to judicial nominees.

"Limp-wristed" seems to be Miranda's insult of choice when it comes to sitting US Senators, because it is the same term he used in attacking Sen. Orrin Hatch several years ago when Hatch refused to defend Miranda when he was forced to resign from his positon on the Hill when it was learned that he had improperly obtained hundreds of internal Democratic memos:

I do admit that reading Democrats' documents on an unprotected server to help defend the president's embattled nominees was political hardball, and I have learned that one shouldn't play hardball with a limp-wristed team captain. 

It seems as if Miranda is not only calling out leading Senators like McConnell, but other right-wing judicial groups as well:

Miranda also declined to ask the Judicial Confirmation Network, one of the leading conservative judicial groups, to sign on to his letter, calling the group “an arm of [Republican] leadership” in the Senate.

Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network said the group is not affiliated with the leadership and said she didn’t “really understand” the comment.

Now, we'll agree that the JCN is essentially an arm of the Senate Republicans, but they have also been among the most vocal critics of President Obama's judicial nominees David Hamilton and Sonia Sotomayor.  They've also led the charge against several of his Department of Justice nominees, including Dawn Johnsen David Ogden, and Elena Kagan.

While we obviously have fundamental disagreements with the Judicial Confirmation Network, nobody can deny that they have been leading the right-wing opposition to President Obama on these issues and have a far greater impact than does Miranda and his gaggle of letter-signers.  

And it seems as if Miranda's superiority complex is, not surprisingly, starting to alienate people:

Miranda, now the chairman of the conservative Third Branch Conference, served as counsel to McConnell’s predecessor, then-Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist. He left that job in 2004 amid allegations that he improperly accessed thousands of memos and emails from Democratic staffers – circumstances McConnell’s supporters recalled as they pushed back hard against Miranda’s arguments Monday.

“It’s unfortunate that one disgraced former employee of previous Senate leadership has decided to air out his grievances rather than join the conservative effort to examine Judge Sotomayor’s record,” said a senior GOP Senate aide. “Not only did this guy steal the Democrats’ playbook, he seems to be implementing it.”

Several related articles today, all pretty much saying the same thing:  even though right-wing groups are doubtful that they’ll actually be able to defeat President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee, they are raising lots of money to try and do so anyway and, in doing so, hope to make it an issue in the 2010 elections.

The New York Times:

While conservatives say they know they have little chance of defeating Mr. Obama’s choice because Democrats control the Senate, they say they hope to mount a fight that could help refill depleted coffers and galvanize a movement demoralized by Republican electoral defeats.

“It’s an immense opportunity to build the conservative movement and identify the troops out there,” said Richard A. Viguerie, a conservative fund-raiser. “It’s a massive teaching moment for America. We’ve got the packages written. We’re waiting right now to put a name in.”

Gary Marx, executive director of the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, said donors, whom he declined to identify, had committed to contributing millions of dollars for television, radio and Internet advertisements that might reunite conservatives in a confirmation battle.

Conservatives face big obstacles, though, in rousing supporters or spurring Republican lawmakers to mount an all-out fight.

The movement is much diminished from four years ago under President George W. Bush, when Supreme Court vacancies last arose and conservatives marshaled their forces to champion his nominees. (Judge Richard Posner, a prominent Reagan appointee, wrote recently that the conservative movement suffers from “intellectual deterioration.”) Republicans have lost control of the White House and Congress, have no clear party leader and have received low approval ratings.

And some leading groups are having budget woes. Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based evangelical group led by the semi-retired James C. Dobson, rallied social conservatives in support of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees, but it recently cut more than 200 jobs.

The conservative movement is sharing its resources as it prepares for the nomination. The Judicial Action Group, founded in 2006 and based in Alabama, has organized a research network — dubbed the Supreme Court Review Committee — of about 15 “pro-family ministries” and conservative legal groups, said Phillip Jauregui, president of the group.

…

 

Manuel Miranda, who has led conference calls for conservative groups about judges, said the focus on such issues would present “a great opportunity to really prepare the great debate with a view toward Senate elections in 2010 and the presidency.”

“It isn’t just about the nominee,” he said. “It’s about the fact that the American people gave control of presidency to a Democrat who will appoint a certain type of judge and the Senate that will most likely rubber stamp that choice.”

Bruce Hausknecht, judicial analyst for Focus on the Family’s political arm, said he believed that despite conservatives’ recent political troubles in other arenas, the public still prefers their judicial philosophy.

“This is an issue that if Americans focus on it, it will bring out their conservative side,” he said. “And that could help the political fortunes of conservatives in the future.”

The Washington Times:

Republicans are going on offense to tarnish potential Supreme Court justice hopefuls, attempting to spark an early fight over President Obama's first nomination to the high court.

…

Wendy Long and Gary Marx of the Judicial Confirmation Network penned a memo for activists on the issue last week, predicting, "The first Obama nominee to the Supreme Court will be hailed by Democrats, liberal interest groups and many in the media as a 'moderate.' No matter how liberal, activist, or extreme she may be."

They said they have crafted a video to "expose the liberal activist records of those who have been named as front-runners to fill Justice [David H.] Souter's seat."

Scott Wheeler, executive director for the National Republican Trust PAC, sent a letter to Republican senators, warning that activists "will hold them accountable" for the nomination process, so they should "keep steadfast and stay true to your Republican conservative values and beliefs."

Mr. Wheeler also went after Mr. Obama's empathy standards, saying that because they "have nothing to do with interpreting the law or the rule of law ... It is up to you and your fellow Republican colleagues to stop such a nomination."

The Washington Independent:

Conservatives, on the other hand, have a number of catch phrases they want to apply to Supreme Court nominees. “We will continue to be using the metaphor of the neutral umpire,” said Marx, echoing the language used by now-Chief Justice John Roberts in his 2005 confirmation hearing. Marx listed two other qualifications a justice should possess: “judicial restraint” and “not legislating from the bench.”

He also pulled out a Biblical reference to make his point. King Solomon, he said, did not need “empathy” or “compassion” to resolve the famous baby case. “Was that compassionate?” he asked rhetorically. “No, it was wisdom.”

Despite their success in determining which terms have come to dominate the debate, conservatives acknowledge that their purpose may not be so much to block the confirmation of a justice as to score political and perhaps fundraising points for future elections.

Marx says that the confirmation debate will have “three huge implications”: it will educate the American people about the issues, help them understand Obama’s true political philosophy and set the stage for the 2010 U.S. Senate campaigns.

According to [Brian Darling of the Heritage Foundtion], the effects of this battle could extend to 2012 as well. “Whoever this nominee’s going to be,” he said, “if the court moves forward on gay marriage or restricts the Second Amendment or goes forward with another change that’s unpopular among the American public… that’s something that will affect the president’s reelection bid.”

Still, the game is likely to change considerably when Obama announces his nominee. “To be honest, I think this is all noise,” Darling conceded. “It will become completely irrelevant when the nominee is put forth.”

Finally, the Right sees signs of hope for its chances of stopping Obama’s SCOTUS nominee in their obstruction of Dawn Johnsen’s confirmation: 

Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, says the stalled Johnsen nomination should send President Obama the message that he does not have a free hand to appoint someone "extreme" to the Supreme Court, even when there are 59 or 60 Democrats in the Senate.
 
"Dawn Johnsen was an executive branch appointee to the Department of Justice. They get more deference, not less, from the Senate than judicial nominees," he notes. "So, if he were to appoint somebody anywhere near as extreme as Dawn Johnsen to the Supreme Court, the nominee would very likely not be confirmed by the Senate."
 
A bold but unlikely pick for Obama, according to Levey, would be black Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears, who is a friend of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and is more moderate than the other potential High Court picks whose names have been floated. 

• Sen. Sam Brownback is being accused of betraying Christians for his support for Kathleen Sebelius.
• Sen. Richard Lugar is also coming under assault from the Right for his support for Dawn Johnsen.
• I don't know that I agree with the headline of this article because, for Huckabee, there has never been much of a difference between the two.
• LifeNews has a tendency to essentially reprint right-wing press releases and pass them off as news.  Need proof? This article contains a quote from Janet Porter that she reportedly "told" LifeNews - a quote that is exactly the same as the one contained in her press release yesterday.
• The Family Research Council responds to Sen. Olympia Snowe's lament about Arlen Specter's defection by saying that it moderates like Snowe and Specter who are exactly the problem with today's GOP.
• Finally, the National Republican Senatorial Committee has decided on a rather bizarre way of dealing with Specter's defection: by making sneering robo-calls to Democrats blasting Specter for being too close to President Bush.

• Former Indiana Congressman Chris Chocola has been tapped as president of the anti-tax group Club for Growth to replace Pat Toomey who is expected to run again Sen. Arlen Specter.
• Right-wing activists are upset with the new head of the Massachusetts Republican Party for saying that "social issues are personal issues ... I am not legislating anyone's personal views."
• Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) has joined the hate crimes scaremongering, saying that if the legislation passes pastors, rabbis, or imams could be charged with encouraging or inducing a "hate crime" if they preach against homosexuality.
• The Susan B. Anthony List claims that its activists sent more than 25,000 letters to the Senate in opposition to Dawn Johnsen.
• Steve Deace has a lot more questions than answers about how marriage equality came to his home state of Iowa.
• Gov. Bobby Jindal knocked down rumors that he was going to run for the Senate in a challenge to Sen. David Vitter.
• Thomas Road Baptist Church has merged with Gleaning for the World, an international relief organization.
• Michael Steele will not be attending the Log Cabin Republicans' annual convention.
• Finally, Alan Keyes appears to have ticked off a lot of Ron Paul supporters by claiming to have taught Paul everything he knows about the Federal Reserve.

Anyone who paid even a minimal amount of attention to the battle over judicial nominations during the George W. Bush’s presidency knows that Senate Republicans were unified in their opposition to the Democrats’ use of the filibuster against a handful of his nominees, going so far as to threaten the “nuclear option” to do away with their ability to block his controversial nominees.

But those days are long gone, as the GOP made clear to President Obama when it pre-emptively threatened to filibuster all of his nominees before he had even made any. And true to form, it looks like they are contemplating using one right off the bat against his very first nominee, David Hamilton:

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee’s ranking Republican, has complained that the Democrats are moving too quickly to consider Mr. Hamilton, a federal trial judge in Indiana since 1994. The committee has set for Wednesday the confirmation hearing on Judge Hamilton, who was nominated only in mid-March.

While that possibility is still a bit down the road, a filibuster of Obama’s nominee head the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, Dawn Johnsen, looks like it might be coming soon:

Republicans senators and aides, granted anonymity to discuss their strategy, said they might consider a filibuster in an effort to block Ms. Johnsen’s confirmation. They will first gauge whether they can attract some support from conservative Democrats, they said, in order to help defeat any motion that would cut off debate.

Roll Call also reports that Republicans are considering filibustering Johnsen and that doing so would be a good way for Sen. Arlen Specter, who is likely facing a tough primary challenge from ultra-conservative Pat Toomey, to demonstrate his conservative bona fides:

Although Senate Judiciary ranking member Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) declined to comment on a possible filibuster until he meets with Johnsen again before leaving for recess at the end of the week, Republicans confirmed that the filibuster option has been discussed by members of the GOP Conference and that opposition to the nomination is mounting … Republicans said Johnsen’s record on a number of key issues has done something that has become increasingly rare in their fractured Conference — uniting social conservatives and security hard-liners.

“She’s got one of those résumés that unites the social conservatives and the war-on-terror conservatives,” a GOP leadership aide said. Johnsen has been a vocal critic of how the Bush administration conducted the war on terror and her views have rubbed hawkish conservatives in the GOP the wrong way.

…

Should Republicans ultimately decide to filibuster Johnsen’s nomination, it could be a boon to Specter’s re-election efforts. Specter is looking at a tough primary challenge from former Rep. Pat Toomey, who came within 17,000 votes of defeating him in the 2004 GOP primary. A recent poll showed Toomey with a double-digit lead over Specter in a hypothetical Republican primary, but with many voters still undecided and the primary more than one year away.

Specter also faces a dwindling base across the state as hundreds of thousands of moderate Republicans have changed their registrations to Democratic since 2004 in the Keystone State. Specter is at a disadvantage in the closed GOP primary without those moderate Republicans and will likely have to mount a voter registration drive to switch some of those Democrats back before 2010.

But a filibuster of Johnsen could help Specter significantly bolster his conservative credentials with the voters back home. One Republican said a filibuster “could be very good for him,” particularly because opposition to Johnsen’s nomination runs the spectrum of conservative constituencies.

That would be quite a change for Specter, who was no fan of the filibuster when Democrats used it against Bush judicial nominees like Miguel Estrada, according to his remarks on the Senate floor on April 2, 2003:

When you strip this argument down, it boils down to an effort by the other side of the aisle to rewrite the advice and consent clause of the Constitution. For more than 200 years, the President has had discretion in the nomination of Federal judges. And unless there is some reason not to confirm them, they then are confirmed … This is simply an effort, when 41 Members from the other side of the aisle decide to oppose cloture, to continue this filibuster … I do believe there is going to have to be some dramatic action taken so that Americans understand the travesty going on in the Senate Chamber today.

So the filibuster of a nominee to a life-time seat on the federal judiciary was a “travesty” to Specter, but a filibuster of an executive branch nominee to a political position might be perfectly acceptable to him?

The New York Times reports today that President Obama is set to make his first judicial nomination in the coming days:

President Obama is expected to name his first candidate to an appeals court seat this week, officials said, choosing David F. Hamilton, a highly regarded federal trial court judge from Indiana, for the appeals court in Chicago.

The article says that Hamilton has the support of both of Indiana's senators and that the administration is hoping his nomination will serve “as a kind of signal” that it wants to move beyond the bruising and nasty confirmation fights of the past:

The administration official said the White House was hoping to reduce the partisan contentiousness of judicial confirmation battles of recent years.

“We would like to put the history of the confirmation wars behind us,” the official said.

Considering this immediate response from Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network, it looks like those on the right have no intention of allowing that to happen:

It's interesting that this is what Obama and the New York Times call a "moderate": Hamilton is a history as a hard-left political activist, and his choice signals that Obama does intend to push extreme liberals onto the bench and politicize the courts as we've never seen before.

Hamilton was a fundraiser for ACORN (nice ACORN payback, Mr. President) and served as vice president for litigation and a board member of the Indiana ACLU. In 1994, when President Clinton nominated him to the district court, the ABA rated him as ‘not qualified,’ apparently of his almost purely political (as opposed to legal and judicial) experience.

Interestingly, he is also the brother-in-law of perhaps the hardest left radical Obama appointee to the Department of Justice, Dawn Johnsen.

Beginning to notice a pattern here?

Indeed we are noticing a pattern here - in fact, it is a pattern that we've been noting for a while in which the Judicial Confirmation Network, a group founded to ensure that President Bush's judges were confirmed, is now leading the fight to make sure President Obama's judges aren't.

• Ken Starr says that President Obama should be prepared for an "uphill battle over his Supreme Court nominees because as a senator he opposed two of President George W. Bush's Supreme Court picks."
• Some group called Conservatives Students Activists and Policy Makers is having a joint conference during the upcoming CPAC that will reportedly feature Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Mike Huckabee, and Joe the Plumber. I have never even heard of them.
• Richard Land continues to insist that pursuing stem-cell research makes us modern day cannibals.
• Among the things that will probably not endear John McCain to the Religious Right is the fact that his daughter and former campaign manager are scheduled to speak at the Log Cabin Republican's convention in April.
• The ACLJ claims that more than 200,000 people have signed onto its anti-Fairness Doctrine efforts and that it is preparing a legal strategy to fight it if it makes a comeback.
• The Alliance Defense Fund has sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee urging it to reject the nominations of David Ogden, Elena Kagan, Dawn Johnsen, and Thomas Perrelli:

"We strongly urge the Senate Judiciary Committee to refrain from appointing David Ogden, Elena Kagan, Dawn Johnsen, and Thomas Perrelli to the Department of Justice, as they have each demonstrated throughout their careers a flawed understanding of the Constitution," said ADF Senior Counsel Gary McCaleb. "Their legal philosophies depart from mainstream views, their professional careers reflect a far-left ideology, and their involvement in the DOJ could jeopardize the proper enforcement of federal law and the development of constitutional doctrines."

Last week I wrote a post about the Right’s opposition to a handful of President Obama nominees to serve in the Justice Department and speculated that this was partially an effort to test their strength under the new administration, but also an effort to start laying the groundwork for their full-blown opposition to his judicial nominees.

The more I see them write about this issue, the more convinced I become that this is actually the case ... and that what they are really preparing for is a Supreme Court battle.  For instance, here is Ken Blackwell writing today about these nominees and why they must be stopped:

Three people in particular are getting close scrutiny this week because their names are before the U.S. Senate. Mr. Obama has nominated David Ogden, Elena Kagan and Dawn Johnsen to be deputy attorney general, solicitor general, and the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), respectively. These positions, in addition to being three of the highest-ranking posts at the Justice Department, are also common stepping stones to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The deputy attorney general is the number two at Justice. The solicitor general is the lawyer who argues for the government in the Supreme Court when the United States is a party to a suit. And OLC issues official legal positions for the federal government.

Each of them - Mr. Ogden, Ms. Kagan and Ms. Johnsen - are committed liberals whose views on a whole range of issues are on the far left. Each of them could argue anti-gun views in our federal courts, and if any of them end up on the bench, could enshrine those views in the law books.

Right-wing pundits and activists are piling on in their opposition to these nominees, primarily David Ogden, and frequently tying the issue to the future of the judiciary and the Supreme Court.

And now the Judicial Confirmation Network has taken out an ad in Roll Call, blasting Sen. Patrick Leahy for moving too quickly and demanding that he slow the confirmation process down. While the JCN's ad doesn't mention the judiciary specifically, considering that the organization's central focus in on the issue of judicial confirmations, it is not too difficult to piece together the obvious connection:

Senator Leahy is trying to ram through the Senate confirmation process the nominations of David Ogden for Deputy Attorney General, Elena Kagan for Solicitor General, and Thomas Perelli for Associate Attorney General. Leahy's abuse of the process makes a mockery of the Senate as the "world's greatest deliberative body." The American people have a right to know about the nominees who have been chosen for the most important legal positions in the executive branch. The Senate has been entrusted with this constitutional responsibility. So why is Senator Leahy forcing a rush to judgment on Department of Justice nominees especially when the vetting process for top jobs in the Obama administration has been so lacking? What is it the Senate needs to know about these nominees that Senator Leahy prefers to brush past? What do you have to say, Senator Leahy?

Below is a copy of a full page ad that we ran in today's copy of Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper. We hope you will join us in asking Senator Leahy . . . why the rush to judgment on these crucial nominations?

What will you have to say, Senator Leahy?

Senator Leahy is trying to ram through the Senate con­firmation process the nominations of David Ogden for Deputy Attorney General, Elena Kagan for Solicitor General, and Thomas Perelli for Associate Attorney General. Leahy's abuse of the process makes a mockery of the Senate as the "world's greatest deliberative body." The American people have a right to know about the nominees who have been chosen for the most important legal positions in the executive branch. The Senate has been entrusted with this constitutional responsibility. So why is Senator Leahy forcing a rush to judgment on Department of Justice nominees – especially when the vetting process for top jobs in the Obama administration has been so lacking? What is it the Senate needs to know about these nominees that Senator Leahy prefers to brush past?

What do you have to say, Senator Leahy?

Until recently, the JCN’s mission was limited to supporting “the confirmation of highly qualified individuals to the Supreme Court of the United States [and working] to 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.” 

But now that President Bush is no longer in office, that mission has apparently broadened and now includes weighing in on Executive Branch nominees as it seeks to position itself to lead the opposition once President Obama starts putting forth judicial nominees.

As we’ve noted before, perhaps the Judicial Confirmation Network should just go ahead and change its name, as the “confirmation” part no longer seems to apply.