Dumbass blocks Obama's judicial nominations of Butler and Nourse

[undeterred]

Crime and Courts: Ron Johnson puts the kibosh on Louis Butler and another judicial nominee
STEVEN ELBOW | The Capital Times | [e-mail] madison.com | Posted: Sunday, August 7, 2011 6:00 am

While President Obama has been successful in getting women and minorities confirmed to federal judicial posts, as this NPR story shows, two nominees in Wisconsin, a woman and an African-American, are going nowhere. That's because of a Senate procedure that allows a single senator to thwart judicial nominees that would serve in the senator's home state. In this case that senator is Ron Johnson, a Republican businessman who narrowly defeated veteran Democrat Russ Feingold last fall.

Johnson has vowed to block the confirmations of former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler and UW law professor Victoria Nourse. Four times now Obama has submitted Butler's name to fill a vacancy in the U.S. Western District Court in Madison, with the blessings of Sen. Herb Kohl and Feingold. As I've previously written here and here, even with Democratic majorities in the Senate, Republicans have been able to employ Senate rules to block his nomination, painting Butler as an ultra-liberal judicial activist and two-time loser in state Supreme Court elections.

With the election of Johnson, Republicans have a more direct mechanism for killing the nomination: a so-called "blue slip," which senators are given by the Senate Judiciary Committee to give a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down to nominees that would serve in their home state. Or they can simply withhold the blue slip and put the nominee on indefinite hold, which Johnson has done. "In my opinion, it goes without saying that Obama did not show proper respect for the people of Wisconsin in attempting to hand an unaccountable, life-tenured position to an activist judge twice rejected by the voters," Johnson says of the Butler nomination in a recent op-ed piece in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Obama nominated Nourse last summer for the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. She has been with the UW Law School since 1993 and is currently the Burrus-Bascom professor of law, and she's also taught at law schools at Emory University, the University of Maryland, Yale, New York University and Georgetown. In the early 1990s she also served as special counsel for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, where she drafted the Violence Against Women Act, contained in the Biden-Hatch Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Johnson dismisses her as unqualified. "Nourse simply does not fit the bill," Johnson says in the op-ed piece. Johnson has proven to be a hard-liner, joining forces with the radical wing of the GOP. With the blue slip process in place, vacancies in both courts in Wisconsin may remain open for a very long time.

Read more: http://host.madison.com/ct/news/local/crime_and_courts/blog/article_e706f772-bf88-11e0-a202-001cc4c03286.html#ixzz1UTusWIuH

Write to Senator Dumbass and tell him what you think: http://ronjohnson.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact

[HelenWheels]

1. Done. nt