Bench Players
REES, MATTHEW
Bench Players by Matthew Rees Touring San Quentin prison in California on March 23, Bob Dole highlighted a budding theme of his presidential campaign: Bill Clinton's liberal judicial appointments....
...When asked to comment on the Supreme Court's celebrated Adarand decision, he said he knew nothing about it...
...This irritates Dole, who has raised the issue with Hatch...
...He is the Clinton-appointed New York judge who made national headlines in January when he excluded from court $4 million worth of drugs found in a suspect's car...
...Dole previewed his talking points in a December 26 op-ed in the Houston Chronicle...
...Perhaps so, but the belated nature of Dole's attention to Clinton judges could undermine his effectiveness in making them a campaign theme...
...This may work for Republicans...
...Dole has allies in making Clinton's judges an issue...
...There could be more to come...
...But launching a campaign against Clinton's judges from the Senate could be problematic...
...Moreover, Senate Republicans are vulnerable to the charge that they haven't adequately exercised their power to "advise and consent...
...The Quinn/Cutler offensive came on the heels of White House spokesman Michael McCurry's March 21 statement that the administration might ask Baer to resign if he didn't reverse his decision...
...Bill McCollum, chairman of the House subcommittee on crime, that the president considered Baer's decision "grievously wrong" and would direct the Justice Department to appeal it...
...I think we're above that...
...And his most memorable response to questions on the Baer issue was, "I oppose crime and I also support the Constitution...
...House speaker Newt Gingrich has repeatedly called on Judge Baer to resign...
...Dole has also suggested curtailing the American Bar Association's role in rating judicial nominees and has sponsored legislation curbing prisoners' ability to file repeated lawsuits...
...Stack is loaded with problems: He's a personal-injury lawyer with no judicial experience who raised $7 million for Clinton in the 1992 presidential campaign (big fund-raisers are usually made ambassadors, not judges...
...The Clinton judiciary, says a Dole campaign aide, will become a "very, very important issue" in the general election...
...Since Republicans took control of the Senate, Clinton's judicial nominees have actually been approved slightly faster than they were by a Democratic Senate...
...Four days earlier, Dole had said that judicial selection underscores the difference between him and Clinton: "It's a choice between a candidate who will appoint conservative judges to the court and a candidate who appoints liberal judges who bend the law to let drug dealers go free...
...Predictably, Mikva has only praise for Hatch...
...Even though Stack has some Republicans (including Dole) salivating, the Judiciary Committee chairman, Orrin Hatch, would prefer not to turn Stack's nomination into a political issue...
...And eager beavers at the Dole campaign are scouring the dockets for more examples of outlandish rulings by Clinton appointees...
...Senate Republicans argue it's not their role to block White House judicial nominations, except in extreme cases...
...He deplored judicial micromanagement of prisons, the threat to the right-leaning Supreme Court posed by Clinton's reelection, and the White House's making "diversity, not quality, the centerpiece of the selection process...
...Another member of the committee, Jon Kyl of Arizona, says, "It's in everybody's best interests to turn the temperature down" on the issue...
...Hatch says this relationship has enabled him to veto preemptively "several" candidates considered for judicial nominations, which explains why prominent legal liberals like Peter Edelman, Laurence Tribe, Walter Dellinger, Kathleen Sullivan, and Cass Sunstein-all of whom would provoke fights-have never been nominated...
...Hatch says his approach in coming months will be "to try to do an apolitical job" as chairman without giving too much leeway to Clinton's "left-wing crazies...
...But the White House will fight fire with fire...
...The chairman's cooperation with the White House makes conservatives like Jipping cringe, but Dole needn't worry about Hatch's straying off the reservation...
...Karlyn Bowman, a public-opinion expert at the American Enterprise Institute, reckons the judiciary "is a good issue that differentiates Republicans from Democrats...
...On March 25, Hatch blasted Baer as "one of President Clinton's lasting legacies" and criticized five other Clinton appointees by name...
...The same day, Lloyd Cutler, a former White House counsel to Clinton, wrote in the Washington Post that the Clinton administration shouldn't be blamed for Baer because senators, not the president, have "the decisive voice in who gets appointed to the federal district courts...
...Should be interesting...
...The White House is wise to seek inoculation from the effects of the Baer episode, but Dole and the GOP have other judges they will try to hang around Clinton's neck...
...Circuit Court of Appeals is pending before the Judiciary Committee...
...Stack's problems have escalated since his February 28 Judiciary Committe hearing...
...One of the wild cards is Hatch...
...We give as good as we get...
...in a drug-infested neighborhood of New York...
...With so many Republican-appointed judges on the bench, Democrats are poised to publicize some judgments by Reagan and Bush judges...
...A March Gallup poll shows little difference in approval ratings between Dole and Clinton on crime...
...We don't need judges who try to find excuses for more criminal behavior," Dole said, and he called on Judge Harold Baer, a Clinton appointee, to resign or be impeached for dismissing as evidence 80 pounds of heroin and cocaine found in the possession of a confessed drug dealer...
...He has also been circulating a mid-March George Will column excoriating Clinton's judicial appointments...
...We are not going to take this lying down," warned Quinn in the New York Times...
...Still, a sharper contrast is needed...
...After two months of negative publicity, the White House responded...
...There were only three public fights over judges during the Bush administration...
...In the past six weeks, Hatch has delivered three floor statements highly critical of Clinton's appointments, and he says more should be expected...
...Baer may change that...
...He summarized his case in a December 22 op-ed in the Washington Times: "Few events can do more to shake the public's confidence in our justice system than a federal judge overstepping his constitutional authority and legislating his own ideological agenda from the bench...
...There are other problems with the Republican assault on the Clinton judiciary...
...Kenneth Ryskamp's membership in the same club sank his confirmation for a seat on the 11th Circuit in 1991...
...Once Dole is in the White House, "liberal judges need not apply...
...Her confession notwithstanding, Baer argued that the police who arrested the woman lacked "reasonable" grounds for stopping her, even though they had observed four men loading her car with duffel bags at 5 a.m...
...Other top Republicans talk of turning Baer into this year's Willie Horton...
...If Dole can tie some of the "crazies" to Clinton- and he should be able to-he's got a powerful message...
...Dole recently told a Hearst newspaper reporter that Hatch has been "too good" about "pushing" Clinton's judicial nominations...
...Hatch says he has received "a lot of pressure to shut the system down" but will work to keep it moving...
...I don't like public spectacles...
...Among the likely poster children are Lee Sarokin of New Jersey, Rosemary Barkett of Florida, Guido Calabresi of Connecticut, and James Beaty of North Carolina, all of whom have handed down egregious decisions...
...In the latest CBS/New York Times poll, crime was cited as the second most important problem facing the country...
...Hatch's efficiency is attributed to his cordial, back-channel partnership with the White House...
...Both Abner Mikva, former counsel to President Clinton, and Eleanor Acheson, an assistant attorney general who handles judicial selection, acknowledge that the administration works closely with Hatch...
...Tom Jipping at the Washington-based Free Congress Foundation points out that not a single Clinton judicial nominee has been defeated, and 181 of 183 lower-court nominations have been approved without floor debate...
...On March 27, White House counsel Jack Quinn published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal defending the administration's judicial appointments and describing two cases in which Reagan and Bush judges reversed convictions in similar cases of seemingly clear-cut guilt...
...A looming embarrassment for the administration is Charles "Bud" Stack of Florida, whose nomination to the 11th U.S...
...Moreover, he's been a member of Miami's exclusive Riviera Country Club...
...That threat drew criticism-including a statement of protest from four appellate judges (who also chastized Dole for suggesting impeachment)-and was not repeated...
...But Quinn asserted in a March 22 letter to Rep...
...Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice in Washington is the author of a forthcoming study revealing "striking" differences between Clinton judges and Reagan/Bush judges on crime and civil rights...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 29
