President Bush on Monday said Congress should stop politicizing the confirmation of judges, saying the process should rise above “the politics of the moment,” though critics said the presidents speech was itself politically motivated.
“It is clear we need to improve the process for confirming qualified judicial nominees,” Mr. Bush said, calling on Congress to hold votes next month on nominees that remain in limbo.
Mr. Bushs speech to several hundred people in Cincinnati served as a legacy marker for the president staking out what he believes he has accomplished in the judicial branch as well as a rallying cry for legal conservatives.
The president set forth a clear case for judges who view the Constitution as having a fixed meaning, rather than as a “living” document which changes over time.
“This concept of a living Constitution gives unelected judges wide latitude in creating new laws and policies without accountability to the people,” Mr. Bush said.
The president said that when he came to office eight years ago, he made a promise to nominate “judges who believed that the Constitution means what it says.”
“With your support, we have kept that pledge for the past eight years,” Mr. Bush said to the crowd, which included members of the conservative Federalist Society and the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University.
“I have appointed more than one-third of all judges now sitting on the federal bench, and these men and women are jurists of the highest caliber, with an abiding belief in the sanctity of our Constitution,” Mr. Bush said.
The White House said that the President has sent 376 nominees for Article III judicial positions on the Supreme Court, the Courts of Appeals (Circuit Courts) and the District Courts, to the Senate.
“Of those, 324 were confirmed and 313 currently sit on the federal bench,” the White House said.
Yet the president also criticized the Democrat-controlled Congress for not confirming all of his nominees, and asked that they give his nominees “the up-or-down vote they deserve.”
White House spokesman Carlton Carroll said there are 27 judicial nominees waiting for a hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, and three have had a hearing in the committee and are waiting for a vote.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, Vermont Democrat, has defended his record previously, stating last month that though confirmations usually slow around a presidential election, he has continued to confirm judges.
“I have continued deep into this presidential election year to hold hearings and take action on both executive and judicial nominees. Despite lack of cooperation from Republican Senators on important legislative matters, Democrats have worked hard to confirm President Bushs judicial nominations,” Mr. Leahy said.
Nan Aron, who heads Alliance for Justice, a liberal judicial group, said Mr. Bushs speech was intended mainly to rally conservatives for political reasons.
“Just as past Republican presidents have done, he is hoping to energize his partys base by flaunting his conservative bona fides,” Mrs. Aron said.
Mrs. Aron said that Mr. Bush has “cemented a transformation of our federal judiciary begun by Ronald Reagan,” but declared that this change in the judiciary has been a negative one.
Rulings by Bush-appointed judges, Mrs. Aron said, have “resulted in less freedom, less privacy and fewer constitutional protections.”
Most of the rulings Mrs. Aron opposed took place in Circuit Courts, or Federal Appeals Courts, which decided over 60,000 cases in 2007, compared with the Supreme Courts 71 cases.
In Mr. Leahy’s reaction to the presidents speech, he agreed with Mrs. Arons complaints, though he targeted the Supreme Court, instead of lower dockets.
“During the Bush-Cheney administration, the Supreme Court has been siding with big corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, injured Americans and investors,” Mr. Leahy said. “Recent decisions by the Supreme Court, like Ledbetter, Exxon, and Riegel have left countless Americans without redress for corporate misconduct.”
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