THE NATHAN HECHT STORY: CONSERVATIVES CAPTURING COURTS

[DonViejo]

SEPTEMBER 17, 2013

POSTED BY JEFFREY TOOBIN

A trivia question for those who fancy themselves experts on the George W. Bush era: Who is Nathan Hecht? No Googling!

Time’s up. Hecht was the Texas judge who gave a hundred and twenty rambling and occasionally bizarre interviews in support of Harriet Miers, Bush’s White House Counsel, when she briefly became a nominee for the seat on the Supreme Court vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor, in 2005. (She was nominated on October 2nd of that year, and withdrew her candidacy on October 25th.) Miers has returned to her law practice in Dallas, and Hecht, as of last week, has a new job: he is now the chief justice of the Texas Supreme Court. Hecht’s rise rates as something more than a where-are-they-now story, because it illustrates, in just one way, the success of the conservative counterrevolution in the nation’s courts.

Like much about the Miers nomination, Hecht’s zealous advocacy had more than a touch of tragicomedy about it. Hecht had been an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court since 1988, and he was, at one point, romantically involved with Miers. Unfortunately, Hecht’s interviews raised more questions about their relationship than they resolved issues around Miers’s qualifications for the Court. As Hecht told the Los Angeles Times, “We are good, close friends. And we have been for all these years. We go to dinner. We go to the movies two or three times a year. We talk. And that’s the best way to describe it. We are not dating. We are not seeing each other romantically. Not currently.”

Hecht himself was the leading conservative on one of the most conservative courts in the nation. So his real purpose in the Miers nomination was to reassure conservative and evangelical groups that Miers was ideologically suitable to fill a precious seat on the Court. This was an important assignment because Miers had spent most of her life in private law practice, serving most notably as the President’s personal attorney. She had almost no public record on constitutional law. On the day Bush named her, Hecht held a conference call with evangelical leaders vouching for Miers’s anti-abortion views. If you trust me, Hecht was saying, you should trust her.

full article:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/09/the-nathan-hecht-story-how-conservatives-change-courts.html

[Gothmog]

1. Nathan Hecht is a bad judge

Hecht is a really bad judge. It is sad that he was just appointed to be CJ of the Texas Supreme Court

[malokvale77]

3. He's worse than a really bad judge...

I became familiar with this creep years ago. I sat on one of his juries. Texas was already on a downhill slide, way back then. It was pretty obvious, to me, things were only going to get worse. I have not been proven wrong.

[radicalliberal]

2. I don't know if he still does, . . .

but Nathan Hecht once advocated replacing court reporters with tape recorders, which he actually said would do just as well. Idiot! Anyone with half a brain would realize it wouldn't work.

My source of info (at the time)? The chairman (now deceased) of one of the country's leading Court Reporting Departments.

[Gothmog]

4. Hecht has been on the Texas Supreme Court for a while

He is the friend of all insurance companies