Things to consider as a new AG nomination waits in the wings.
Is Bush moving his own lawyers into key judicial positions? Where?
Which new lawyers has Bush moving into the White House and why?
All judicial appointments under Bush need to be examined in light of the USA firings and politization revelations.
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Presidentialist Lawyers in Black Robes
By Charlie Savage |
http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/tableforone/2007/sep/12/presidentialist_lawyers_in_black_robesToday I’m going to talk about the Supreme Court, and how the Bush-Cheney legal team’s strategy of picking presidential lawyers to fill court vacancies has been an integral part of the groundwork it has laid for a long-term expansion of White House power.......
In 2005, when President Bush nominated John Roberts, Harriet Miers, and then Samuel Alito to fill the first two Supreme Court vacancies in a decade, observers outside the executive branch largely evaluated the nominees through the lens of social issues such as abortion rights. Lost amid the hubbub (especially for the first two nominations, which concluded before the warrantless wiretapping program came to light and before Bush issued the torture ban signing statement) was what I believe to be an essential factor behind all three nominations. There was a broad array of prominent and very conservative legal scholars and lower-court judges from which the Bush-Cheney legal team could have selected its nominees. Tellingly, the administration chose all three from a very narrow slice of the conservative legal universe: all three were executive branch legal warriors. They had each spent years marinating in disputes over expanding executive powers from the White House’s perspective, and were thus likely to bring a very deferential attitude to the bench when future lawsuits arose over aggressive claims of presidential authority. .........
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