At their judicial conference Tuesday, 9th Circuit Judges blasted the Feeney Amendment included in the PROTECT Act that limits judicial discretion in sentencing:

The opposition was voiced during a two-day meeting of the 15 chief district judges of the U.S. 9th Circuit that concluded here Tuesday. Judge John Coughenour of Seattle said the group had ``virtual unanimity'' in its disdain for the law, which compels judges to strictly follow sentencing guidelines and orders that reports be sent to Congress on anyone who deviates from them.

The change, which was supported by Attorney General John Ashcroft, was part of an anti-crime bill signed by President Bush last year. The Justice Department made no attempt to consult with judges, Coughenour said, and ignored a commission created by Congress to make sentencing recommendations.

....The 9th Circuit includes federal courts in Hawaii, Arizona, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Alaska, as well as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands.

The PROTECT act is bad and needs to be repealed. Ashcroft needs to go. Boot Bush.

Via Center for American Progress and Atrios:

LOTT'S FLIP-FLOP: Sen. Trent Lott (R-MS), the same senator who left his leadership position after a racially insensitive comment, is once again in the middle of a racially charged issue. A few years back, Lott used a position on judicial appointments to oppose the recess appointment of Roger Gregory as the first African-American judge ever to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. At the time, Lott categorically declared that "any appointment of a federal judge during a recess should be opposed." Now, in order to help Pickering, Lott is changing his position to favor recess appointments. Lott said that "Judge Pickering's record deems this recess appointment fully appropriate."

Law Prof. Glenn Reynolds (aka Instapundit) on the recess appointment of Charles Pickering to the 5th Circuit:

...It's unfortunate that things have come to this pass. Recess appointments to the bench are nothing new, but this one is clearly another step in the ongoing breakdown of civility in government. .... I suspect, though, that we're in the midst of a political realignment, and that those "norms of civility" hold mostly during periods of relative stability.... Larry Solum has more here, and David Bernstein opines that this was a bad choice: "Pickering was among the worst of the Bush judicial nominees."

The New York Times criticizes the appointment here.

Calpundit and Atrios note the irony of the appointment occurring on Martin Luther King's birthday weekend. Our reaction is here, and very simple: Boot Bush.

Update: The Horse has some great Pickering stuff up, including this.

Unbelievable. President Bush installed one of his most objectionable federal judicial nominees, Charles Pickering, on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals while Congress is in recess. Pickering will serve until January, 2005--or for life, if the Senate confirms him next year.

In an election-year slap at filibustering Democrats, President Bush sidestepped Congress on Friday and installed Mississippi judge Charles Pickering to the federal appeals court after a two-year battle filled with racial, religious and regional argument.

Bush elevated Pickering by recess appointment, simply putting him in office while Congress was out of session. Such appointments, bypassing confirmation, are valid until the next Congress takes office, in this case in January 2005.

People for the American Way had this to say about Bush's action:

This President is dedicated to packing the courts with right-wing judges who will turn back the clock on equal rights, privacy and reproductive freedom, environmental protection and much of the social justice progress we've made in the past half-century. He has demonstrated arrogant disregard for the constitutional checks and balances that ensure independent and fair courts.

"Announcing this appointment as Americans prepare to celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King is an insult to his memory, and to all Americans who are committed to equal justice under the law."

We have this to say: Boot Bush.

A few days ago we wrote about the improper questions asked by Jeb Bush appointees on the Florida Judicial Nominating Commission when interviewing applicants for judgeships. Friday, a panel of the Florida Bar will hold a hearing on the matter:

A Florida Bar panel will consider this morning whether members of a judicial nominating commission appointed by Gov. Jeb Bush asked judicial candidates in Broward County questions that were sexually discriminatory or were political or religious litmus tests.

An additional incident has been reported that will be investigated:

...the [Miami Daily Business] Review has discovered one additional incident, involving a candidate who was asked during a Broward JNC interview to do a humorous impression of a black Broward judge.

We don't expect much to come of the investigation:

Bar president Miles A. McGrane III said that even if members of the 17th Judicial Circuit JNC behaved improperly, his organization "can do literally nothing about it," and that "the sole remedy is with the governor." McGrane said that even though the Bar conducted its own investigation of alleged misconduct by a JNC member three years ago, it "can't" order an investigation now because JNC members are constitutionally appointed officers.

Update: Our apologies to all. We forgot to include the link to the article quoted from below. We were offline all day and just received an email telling us about it. The article is in today's Miami Business Review and it's called Not Taken On Faith.

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original post

Are you thinking of applying to become a judge in Florida? Get ready for questions like these:

• "Will you be able to balance your duties as a single mother of twins with your duties as a Broward judge?"

Applicants have also been asked:

• Whether they are active in their church.

• Whether the candidate is a "God-fearing person."

• How they feel about the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 ruling striking down a Texas law criminalizing homosexual activity.

• How they would feel about having the Ten Commandments posted in their courtroom.

All of the members of the Judicial Nominating Commission were appointed by Jeb Bush.

Will someone please tell this former Judge that his 15 minutes are over?

By TChris

It comes as no surprise that Democrats in the Senate try to block extremely conservative nominees to the federal judiciary while Republicans try to block the most liberal nominees. The leaking of internal memos apparently written by aides to two Democratic Senators and stored in the computers of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- memos that "sketch the evolution between 2001 and early 2003 of plans to filibuster court nominees perceived as too conservative" -- has nonetheless provoked predictable controversy and finger-pointing. The leaker, underlining a sentence recommending that the Committe refrain from approving Sixth Circuit nominations until the Supreme Court decided the affirmative action cases that were then pending, wrote "Talk about political!" in the margin.

But Democrats on the committee are happy to return fire, noting that when Bill Clinton was president, Senate Republicans blocked all nominees to the same court, perhaps with the same explosive affirmative action cases in mind.

... "Each party ratchets up the politicization of the process," said Peter Berkowitz, a fellow of the Hoover Institution. "There were Republican abuses that are now taken a step farther by the Democrats -- and I expect when we see the next Democratic president, the Republicans will ratchet it up one more step."

The fact that each party seeks to mold the judiciary to reflect the party's values is not a well kept secret. Nor is it surprising that Republicans seek to gain political advantage from the memos by holding them up as proof that Democrats have "contrived a controversial filibuster of judicial nominees from the raw material of crass politics, driven by the demands of liberal special interest groups." Democrats, in turn, "see the memos as evidence of GOP perfidy, no less incriminating than a pillowcase full of silverware in the gloved hands of a burglar." Debate about the memos is a pointless distractiion from the Judiciary Committee's critical task: evaluating and approving the nomination of qualified judicial candidates who are acceptable to both political parties.

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New York's federal judges are speaking out against Congress' recent changes to federal sentencing law.

The Feeney Amendment, tacked onto the Amber Alert bill, is part of the PROTECT act. It limits the instances in which judges can grant downward departures from the federal sentencing guidelines, stripping the judges of their ability to impose individualized sentences when they deem it appropriate. It also creates a very objectionable reporting system, which is likely to be used as a blacklist of judges.

Like the Patriot Act, the law was passed without hearings and without meaningful debate. It was passed over the objections of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, the Judicial Conference, the ABA and the majority of prosecutors and defense lawyers who deal with the guidelines every day.

One federal judge, John Martin, has taken early retirement in protest of the "unjust nature of the sentencing process." Second Circuit Judge John M. Walker Jr. and 26 other judges from around the country have issued a statement calling for repeal of the new law.

And in perhaps the boldest criticism of the law, another federal judge in Brooklyn, Sterling Johnson Jr., who was New York City's special narcotics prosecutor from 1975 until 1991, recently issued a wide-ranging order that directly contradicts the law's provision granting Congress more direct access, without the need for judicial permission, to a variety of case documents. Judge Johnson placed a blanket seal on all such documents in cases before him, forbidding Congress to examine these materials without his approval.

It's not just the liberal judges that object to the law. Judge John F. Keenan, a Reagan appointee says, "Even I recognize that this administration has taken a step too far."

We're glad that these judges refuse to be intimidated by Congress. The Feeney Amendment violates the separation of powers doctrine and in essence creates a blacklist of judges who won't go along. We hope that judges around the country follow the example of these outspoken New York jurists and "just say no" to Feeney.

Sen. Edward Kennedy has introduced S. 1086, The JUDGES Act, to repeal Feeney. Contact your Senators and urge support for the bill.

Julia at Sisyphus Shrugged picked up on this letter to the editor in Friday's Washington Post:

In the recent marathon debate on judicial nominations, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch earnestly expressed the view that the Democrats' filibuster against several of President Bush's nominations was unprecedented and even unconstitutional. This led me to dig up some old Congressional Records from April 1980, when Senate Republicans mounted a filibuster against President Carter's nominee for general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board -- a man who had served as a career attorney at the board for 27 years.

The senator leading the filibuster said it was his "unfortunate duty to challenge the nomination" because, although he "personally liked" the nominee, he was "too pro-labor" and other qualified nominees would be "acceptable to business." After five days of floor debate, the filibuster was broken on the second cloture vote, and the nominee was confirmed for a four-year term.

The reason I remember this episode so well is that the nominee was William A. Lubbers, my father, and the senator leading the filibuster was Orrin G. Hatch.

JEFFREY S. LUBBERS

Despite the Republicans' grandstanding and public relations campaign to stage a 50 + hour debate-athon in the Senate over the Dems blocking some of the more objectionable Bush nominees for lifetime judicial appointments, they failed. Miserably.

The Republicans failed to get the votes they needed to overcome the opposition to Janice Rogers Brown, Carolyn Kuhl and Priscilla Owen.

The three votes followed the Senate's longest nonstop debate since a 57-hour, 24-minute marathon in 1988 over campaign legislation. ....Republicans, who hold a narrow majority, decided to hold the debate after criticism from conservative activists they were not doing enough to take on Democrats.

Democrats said they had simply exercised a constitutional right to "advise and consent" to stop Bush from packing the courts with what they called right-wing ideologues who could not be trusted to uphold civil rights, abortion rights, worker rights and environmental protections. They also noted they had joined Republicans in confirming 168 of Bush's other judicial nominees, to reduce the vacancy rate on the federal bench to less than 5 percent, its lowest level in more than a decade.

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Alabama Chief Justice Roy S. Moore was removed from office after a hearing today by a state judicial panel:

The Alabama chief justice whose refusal to obey a U.S. order to move a Ten Commandments monument fueled a national debate over the place of God in public life was stripped of his office by a state judicial panel on Thursday.

"Finding no other viable alternatives, this court hereby finds that Roy S. Moore be removed from his position as chief justice of Alabama," said a statement read by a member of the nine-member judicial panel.

The panel found that Moore "willfully and publicly" defied the federal order, placing himself above the law in doing so. The 5,000-pound monument was removed on Aug. 27. The U.S. Supreme Court last week refused to hear appeals from Moore in his bid to restore the marker to public view.