Word: estradas
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...Senate Democrats kicking up such a fuss over a Hispanic lawyer who wants to be a judge? Their filibuster against Bush's nomination of Miguel Estrada, a Honduran-born Washington attorney, to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is risky for the party, since the G.O.P. has resorted to phone banks and radio ads to portray opposition to the nomination as anti-Hispanic...
...Estrada has refused to be drawn into discussions of how he would decide cases that would come before him or to criticize Supreme Court opinions that, as a lower court judge, he would be bound faithfully to apply. The Times has also reported that the American Bar Association has a canon of judicial ethics that condemns as unethical just such statements by judges running for judicial office. And in a recent Supreme Court case, several Justices have stated that the same ethical constraints should apply to judicial nominees. Indeed both Justices Scalia and Frankfurter, among others, have sternly declined...
...Estrada also declined to be drawn into abstract discussions about his judicial philosophy. Not every good lawyer or judge has a “judicial philosophy,” nor should they be required to have one. This is professors’ stuff, and forcing practical men and women to spout pretentious platitudes on these subjects serves no useful purpose. As has been shown time and again, answers to such questions are not even good predictors of actual judicial performance. Certainly subjecting Estrada to such a sophomoric inquisition is not necessary to assure the Senate of Estrada?...
Many opponents of Estrada’s nomination cite the fact that Estrada is opposed by the Alliance for Justice. Where have these people been all these years? The Alliance is a far-left pressure group that makes its living by whipping up its liberal five- and ten-dollar contributors to oppose any conservative judicial nomination that they can make a fuss about. And here they have decided to take a Republican scalp back home to their membership...
...charges, which are mindlessly repeated, are pure political persiflage to block the confirmation of a powerful conservative intellect, who because of that intellect, his Central American ethnicity, his relative youth and his compelling life story may one day be an attractive candidate for the Supreme Court. I wonder if Estrada had not been an emigrant from Honduras whether the Democrats—not to mention the Congressional Hispanic Caucus by which many set such store—would even have taken notice, much less thought this nomination was worth the high political costs of a filibuster. I suppose that...