Trent Lott on Fox News says that Democrats are blocking judicial nominees because of racism!

Video

Lott uses Miguel Estrada's nomination as the basis for racial discrimination.

From Independent Judiciary

Judicial Temperament. A member of the Federalist Society and a board member of the arch-conservative Center for the Community Interest, Mr. Estrada is described by people who have worked with him as a conservative ideologue who is unable or unwilling to distinguish his personal views from what the law requires. That this evidence does not come in the form of law review articles, judicial opinions, or written criticism by colleagues on a state supreme court does not make it any less troubling.

Miguel Estrada is held in high regard by James Dobson from the "Focus on the Family" group and is their hopeful for the supreme court.

More on Ashcroft:

Antonin Scalia Is an Enemy of the State!

So says John Ashcroft. Jeffrey Dubner reports

GET YOUR ROBES OUT OF OUR PRISONS! I just watched John Ashcroft's address to the Federalist Society. It's a gripping speech, and quite frightening. He devotes the greatest portion of it to challenging the Supreme Court's decisions in Rasul v. Bush, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, and the other "enemy combatant" cases. A taste:

...intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas of treaties can put at risk the very security of our nation at a time of war.

It's very much in the vein of "the ability to set aside the laws is inherent in the president." There's no transcript available just yet, and I expect there'll be analyses and critiques up by more qualified legal folks than I by the time we get back from the weekend. But I wonder how confined this constitutional theory is to Ashcroft, and whether it will in any way leave office with him. I highly doubt it.

UPDATE: Tonight's keynote speaker is, of course, Federalist Society member and Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. He's as like as not to agree with Ashcroft on this, although it's hard to be sure.

I do think that this is, in part, fallout from Bush v. Gore. Everybody knows that Scalia and company don't believe the equal protection rationale they set forward for their decision. And if what the Supremes are doing is expressing their political preferences rather than setting forth judicial principles--well, why should their will get to override Bush's and Ashcroft's? Just because Scalia, Rehnquist, and company ruled in favor of Bush in 2000 doesn't mean that Bush and company respect them for it.

On Tuesday, Senate Democrats beat back Jeff Sessions’ filibuster of Obama’s first judicial nominee – Judge David Hamilton – by a reassuring margin of 70-29. Sessions lost ten of his fellow Republicans, including conservatives like Hatch, Cornyn, and Thune, and Hamilton will be confirmed Thursday afternoon to the Seventh Circuit.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that the GOP is winning the battle for the federal courts.

Just a few short years ago, right-wing Senators denounced filibusters of President Bush’s nominees in the strongest possible language and threatened to employ the “nuclear option.” Sessions went even further – he claimed Democrats were violating the Constitution by blocking any Bush nominee (no matter how extreme). But some time after November 4, 2008, his interpretation of the Constitution must have changed dramatically.

Now a Democrat is in the White House, and – hypocrisy be damned! – Sessions is vehemently pro-filibuster and pro-obstruction. And the worst part is that he’s been successful. Judge Hamilton was nominated in March to general acclaim. He received the highest possible rating from the ABA, both his home-state Senators strongly endorsed him (including senior Senate Republican Dick Lugar), and even the head of the Indianapolis Federalist Society backed him. It doesn’t get much better than that.

But the nomination was dragged out for months by the GOP. As a result, Hamilton will become just the seventh Obama nominee to be confirmed to the federal bench. By contrast, nearly 30 such Bush nominees had been confirmed at the same point. We’re talking lifetime appointments to the highest courts in our land. President Obama obviously has his hands full, but he can’t afford to neglect this crucial aspect of his legacy.

But so far, Obama has been playing into the hands of the GOP obstructionists. He’s nominated fewer than half as many people as Bush had at this point. That has got to change, and quickly. The Obama administration has a window of just 4-5 months to return some semblance of balance to the federal bench before the mid-term elections. The choice is simple: act now to fill the judicial pipeline with highly qualified progressive nominees, or let Sessions and Bush win.

Not content with its past role in screening candidates for positions in the Bush judiciary and Justice Department, the conservative Federalist Society is back to defend the Bush torture team it helped create. Ironically, the Federalists' conference call Monday came just three days after McClatchy reported that Steven Bradbury - one of its members and a figure at the center of the storm over the release of the OLC torture members - refuted their claim that the military's SERE training program proved the United States did not torture terror detainees.

As Politico reported, the National Review hosted a media conference call featuring many of the usual suspects among the Bush torture apologists:

The lawyers' group, which was a pipeline for judges in the Bush White House, is hosting a call this morning with National Review writer Andy McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, lawyer David Rivkin, and Chapman University Law School Dean John Eastman.

Their claim, as Politico noted, was that the "much-criticized memos from the Office of Legal Counsel were perfectly reasonable." McCarthy brushed off the CIA's use of waterboarding on terror suspects by proclaiming "they were not going to be killed by the tactic." Eastman, whose university is hosting Federalist Society member and Bush torture architect John Yoo as a visiting professor, insisted the treatment was no worse than that undergone by American service personnel:

Eastman responded to The New York Times's Scott Shane about the use of waterboarding during the Spanish Inquisition and by the Japanese military, and responded "that psychological reviews of graduates of the military's SERE program, in which members of the U.S. military were waterboarded, is a more relevant example.

"Why would I go and look at something the Spanish Inquisition did just because it was also called 'waterboarding'?" he asked.

Perhaps because, as the Bush Office of Legal Counsel chief and 2005 torture memo author Steven Bradbury concluded four years ago, "SERE trainees know it is part of a training program."

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The Heretik: Another of G-Dub's "advisors" has admitted a military victory in Iraq is no longer possible.  This is a tale told to an idiot who, just last week, held communist Vietnam up as an example of what Iraq could become "if we do not quit."

Pensito Review: Bush eliminates hunger...the word, that is

TPMmuckraker: McCain says the Bush administration breaks laws to hide Global Warming data.  Meanwhile, the anti-science administration's Dept. of Health & Human Services has rather unsurprisingly declared that they don't know what "scientifically accurate" means.

NewsHog: More on the striking Houston janitors trampled by mounted police and jailed. Put together what Jim Webb sees with what Dick Cheney told the Federalist Society and add in the uber-right's own rhetoric about the enemy within and last Friday's use of the police as paramilitary strike-breakers and tell me you aren't the least bit worried.

TalkLeft: Keisler must be blocked...unless you want a former Bork law clerk who Bork himself calls "one of my favorites", on the D. C Circuit and the fast track to the Supreme Court

AGITPROP: Wingnut Roundup

Blue Gal: Jill Carroll - something we can do

FBIHOP: New report from Europe on CIA's secret prisons

We'd be worried about the stunning incompetence of our self-described “War President" if Darth Cheney hadn't assured us that the Iraq insurgency was in it's “last throes."

The Revealer: New Canadian PM, Stephen Harper, is politically and religiously much further right than George W. Bush. God help 'em...
Somebody should ask Justice John Scalia why he shunned Chief Justice John Roberts' swearing-in for a Federalist Society paid junket that included a cocktail party co-hosted by Abramoff's former law partners.  Ethics, schmethics.

The Daily Howler: The NYT's fatuous Elizabeth Bumiller knows what G-Dub's readin' and what he thinks about them books.  How?  Because Scotty told her.

Somebody should ask Justice John Scalia why he shunned Chief Justice John Roberts' swearing-in for a Federalist Society paid junket that included a cocktail party co-hosted by Abramoff's former law partners. Ethics, schmethics.

The Daily Howler: The NYT's fatuous Elizabeth Bumiller knows what G-Dub's readin' and what he thinks about them books. How? Because Scotty told her.

Live Blogging from Supreme Court Watch:

"A second Repubican senator, Orrin Hatch of Utah (defying conventional political tie conventional wisdom in a very nice gold striped number), seems to be trying to lay the groundwork that it’s okay for Judge Roberts not to answer questions he find uncomfortable. Hatch tried to bring up a Harding nomination from years ago, citing a same-day nomination and confirmation as some kind of gold standard."

Senator Hatch himself in 1997 said:

"The Senate can and should do what it can to ascertain the jurisprudential views a nominee will bring to the bench in order to prevent the confirmation of those who are likely to be judicial activists. Determining which will become activists is not easy since many of President Clinton's nominees tend to have limited paper trails... Determining which of President Clinton's nominees will become activists is complicated and it will require the Senate to be more diligent and extensive in its questioning of nominees' jurisprudential views." (Address of Senator Hatch before University of Utah Federalist Society chapter, February 18, 1997)"