Three cheers for CBS News’ Jan Crawford for challenging Hillary Clinton’s nonsense claim this week that the Trump administration is making a mockery of the courts by loading them up with young judicial nominees who lack “relevant experience.”
“This is just wrong on multiple levels,” the CBS correspondent said on social media in response to the two-time failed presidential candidate’s partisan remarks. “[N]o one should ever assume Republicans don’t take ‘seriously’ the selection of judges.”
Crawford added, “Dismissing those judges as political hacks is a disservice and cheapens our discourse. And a Yale-educated lawyer not looking to score cheap political points should know better.”
Clinton said specifically this week during an event at Georgetown Law School, which featured also former President Bill Clinton and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, that the Trump administration is nominating judges based mostly on age.
“I do think, though, when you’re making decisions as momentous as picking judges for the federal bench, the person you consider should have relevant experience and should be judged qualified to hold the positions,” said the former secretary of state.
Clinton added, “Obviously, that wasn’t a worry with Justice Ginsburg, but we’ve recently seen people largely chosen on the basis of age, and therefore longevity, and political ideology being pushed through despite having no relevant experience.”
In previous administrations, she continued, party leaders “took seriously the selection of judges,” adding that they looked first for judicial nominees’ qualifications.
“Even if they were trying to find somebody who would get to the result they wanted, they wanted to be able to say that this was a distinguished lawyer, that this was a judge with experience,” Clinton said.
“That obviously was never an issue with people that Bill picked, but it is an issue now, and it’s something that lawyers and academics should be saying a lot more about than I think is being said,” she said.
The usual suspects — including the Washington Post’s politically shape-shifting conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin — complained that Crawford would dare to challenge Clinton’s #Resistance back-benching. But Rubin’s weak pushback gave the CBS reporter an excuse to explain exactly why Clinton’s comments were so disingenuous and historically illiterate.
“[O]nly a federal district court judge or state court appellate judge can be nominated to an federal appellate court? I guess Justice Kagan can be glad President Obama didn’t agree with you on that.”
She added once more for good measure, “[It] was wrong to paint all these judges with a broad brush as unqualified, wrong to say Republicans don’t take judges seriously. That is factual and something everyone should be aware of.”
Crawford is right. The standard promoted now by people such as Clinton and Rubin retroactively applies to several judges whose nominations failed to draw similar criticisms about “relevant experience.”
In fact, as National Review contributor Dan McLaughlin correctly notes in a tweet, the number of appellate judges on the D.C. Circuit who served with no prior judicial experience includes “8 of the 11 active judges, including 3 of 4 Obama appointees & all 3 Clinton appointees, 6 of the 7 senior judges, [and] all 8 Supreme Court Justices” who went on to the Supreme Court via the D.C. Circuit.
The list of D.C. Circuit judges who served despite a total lack of prior judicial experience includes John Roberts, Merrick Garland, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself.
“If you’re keeping score,” McLaughlin notes, “that includes 3 Chief Justices…, three nominees who almost made the Supreme Court, and the guy after whom they named the courthouse in which the [D.C. Circuit] sits.”
Other than that, Clinton and Rubin make a great point about Trump judicial nominees.
