I’m currently listening to Terry Gross interview C. Boyden Gray, founder of the Committee for Justice, member of the Federalist Society, advisor to former President George H.W. Bush, advisor to the current President Bush, and self-declared defender of the President’s slate of judicial nominees.
A few of his claims so far:
- No judicial nominee has ever been defeated by Senate filibuster.
- Only Democrats have attempted to block Presidential judicial nominees.
- Democrats have no right to block the President’s judicial nominees, because they lost the election.
- President Bush’s judicial nominees are, across the board, reasonable and completely within the mainstream.
- The Federalist Society is “just a simple debating society.” (Other members of the Federalist Society include former Attorney General John Ashcroft, Bush Solicitor General Ted Olsen, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Assistant Attorney General and primary author of the PATRIOT Act Viet Dinh, conservative Repbulican Senator Orrin Hatch, former independent counsel Kenneth Starr, failed Reagan Supreme Court appointee Robert Bork, The Bell Curve author Charles Murray, and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson).
- The Federalist Society doesn’t do any vetting of George Bush’s judicial nominees.
- Democrats don’t like minorities who are conservative.
- Any judicial decision that strays from “the Constitution as it was written” is illegitimate “legislating from the bench.”
- Even given the small margin of the President’s recent election victory, it’s a “preposterous suggestion” that he “veer off to the Left” by “giving anything to his enemies,” such as nominating moderate judges to Federal courts.
This is a short list that I have compiled while listening, and is not nearly as complete as I might like. Mr. Gray, I might point out, has not bothered to back a single one of these claims with any sort of evidence beyond his own declarations that IT IS SO. When pressed to explain himself or confronted with a claim to the contrary, his response is, invariably, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”