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The imminent confirmation battle of the Supreme Court is a pivotal moment for the nation, which can tilt the direction of decisions toward conservative results for decades.
Yet, if the recent past is political prologue, the least dramatic moment of the process will be the chapter that is supposed to be the most enlightening: confirmation hearings.
It is at least so that the advisers of President Trump will develop their game plan, following a path laid out by their predecessors in the Barack administrations. Obama and George W. Bush
The Supreme Court candidate has learned the lessons of Robert H. Bork, named 31 years ago on Sunday in circumstances similar to the current vacancy caused by the upcoming retirement of Justice Anthony M Kennedy. ] At the time, President Ronald Reagan appointed Bork, then US Circuit Court of Appeals Judge for the DC Circuit, replacing Lewis F. Powell Jr., the most high court of the Supreme Court. important swing vote. Bork was flamboyant in his writings as a professor at Yale Law School, before joining Nixon's Department of Justice and obtaining judicial appointment
At the 1987 confirmation hearings, Bork clashed openly with the chairman of the committee. Joe Biden (D-Del.), Particularly on the 1965 case that allowed couples to use contraception
"As I hear you, you do not believe that there is a general right to privacy, "said the future vice president.
"Not a derivative in this way," Bork replied.
It did not matter that the candidate tries to explain that he had no objection to contraception, just as the Supreme Court of the Warren era decided the case. Bork was transformed into an off-contact jurist who opposed the most basic levels of intimate private life and was eventually rejected in a broad bipartisan opposition vote, 42-58.
In Senate appointments: no retirement, no compromise
Instead, Reagan finally appointed Kennedy to occupy that seat. This was a historical ideological change, given that the next 30 years of Kennedy favored liberal social positions on abortion and gay rights, while providing the fifth critical vote for business-friendly decisions such as last week's decision. the power of unions to collect contributions.
The next generation of Confirmation Counselors learned to coach candidates to avoid the landmines Bork had encountered.
"These days, candidates are smart enough to know that they only need to" said Jamie Brown Hantman, who worked at Bush's White House and sat on the team "Sherpa" who presided over Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Ronald Weich, Dean of the Faculty of Law of the University of Baltimore, worked on the On the other side of the 2005 and 2006 nominations as a lawyer for Senate Democrats, before moving on to the Ministry of Justice in 2009 and working on the appointments of Judges Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. [19659014] "They watched previous audiences as major league baseball hitters watch the launcher's tapes that they will face the next day," which also served as an advisor to Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) during four nomination hearings in the 1990s.
Weich ad it's that counselors of the candidates developed what he called the "80-20 rule" – hoping that senators would take 80 percent. Of the hearings with long questions, the candidates would occupy 20% of the time. 100 with precise and clear answers.
Take the last two Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in 2010 and 2017, about judges appointed by a Democratic president and a Republican president, and note how the candidates handled the burning issues of the ranking minority party member .
"Well, Senator Sessions, I'm not quite sure how I would characterize my policy. But one thing I know is that my policy would be, must be, must be completely separate from my judgment, "Kagan told Jeff Sessions (Ala.), Then the highest Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. In agreement with you to the extent that you say, look, judge is to consider a case that is presented to you. "
Archive | As the Gorsuch is appointed, this man takes credit: Mitch McConnell
Then the exchange between Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) And Judge Neil M. Gorsuch last year, Gorsuch having deviated his questions on which
"All that I can do, it is – I can not promise you how I would decide in a particular case.It would be deeply wrong, to sit here at a confirmation table.And I think we are d & # 39;
Increased partisanship has also limited the hope of earn 90 votes – or even unanimous support, as Anthony Kennedy received in 1988. Kagan got 63 votes, with just In 1965, Gorsuch got 55 votes, and three Democrats supported him, and this, after Senate Republicans have changed the rules, unilaterally, to eliminate the 60-voice hurdle to eliminate a filibuster on Supreme Court appointments. The Trump candidate will enter this confirmation fight knowing that the goal is to target those few potential Republicans, particularly Susan Collins (Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), in the same way as the litigants appearing before the Supreme Court. "Without a phenomenal mistake, you can expect every Republican to vote for the Republican candidate.Most Democrats will probably vote against." Brown Hantman said:
Hours after Bork's nomination, Senator Kennedy has delivered a heated three-minute speech – largely based on Bork's writings at Yale – that shaped the terms of the upcoming debate. "Robert Bork's America is a land where women would be forced to have an abortion, blacks would sit in front of segregated counters, rogue police could destroy the doors of citizens during night raids, schoolchildren could not learn the evolution. "
Candidates today have often prepared for the whole of their adult lives, knowing that if they go too far from their writings, like Bork, their audiences will be much more troubling. Dean of Harvard Law, did not leave much written record to tear and, because the Republicans had blocked her appointment to the federal judiciary in 1999, she had no legal opinion to give.
Sessions bore no resemblance to Kennedy on Bork, complaining of the little he knew of his judicial philosophy. "Without judicial notice, it will be particularly important that other aspects of his case have these characteristics," he said
which is exactly the kind of complaint that Trump officials hope to hear when They will deploy the candidate. ] Read more from the archive of Paul Kane, follow him on Twitter or subscribe to his updates on Facebook
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