CORNYN’S ‘POWER GRAB’…. The non-partisan Congressional Research Service reported last year that historically, when a president is of one party and both of a state’s senators are of a different party, “the primary role in recommending candidates for district court judgeships is assumed by officials in the state who are of the President’s party.”
That makes sense. For example, when Bush was president and he needed recommendations for the federal bench in a state with two Democratic senators, there was no point in asking them for a list of names — the Bush White House wouldn’t approve of the jurists the Democrats had in mind. In those cases, Bush would turn to either House Republicans from those states, or Republican officials at the state level.
With this in mind, the Obama White House stated plainly this week that it would work with the Democrats in Texas’ House delegation when selecting judges, U.S. attorneys, and U.S. marshals.
Yesterday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) denounced this and described it as wholly unacceptable. And what kind of process does Cornyn prefer?
Cornyn says he intends to send Obama candidates who have been screened by the committee he and Hutchison have always used for making nominations — a committee he admits is “heavily stacked with Republican lawyers.”
And why is that? Because he doesn’t want the selection process “to be viewed as a partisan exercise” and this is the only way he can “depoliticize the nomination process.”
So when there was a Republican in the White House, Cornyn, Hutchison, and a bunch of Republican lawyers controlled the judicial selection process because that is what the people of Texas elected them to do … but now that there is a Democrat in the White House, Cornyn, Hutchison, and a bunch of Republican lawyers must maintain control over the process in order “depoliticize the nomination process.”
And Cornyn wonders why it’s so difficult to take anything he says seriously.
