The New York Times reports today that President Obama is set to make his first judicial nomination in the coming days:
President Obama is expected to name his first candidate to an appeals court seat this week, officials said, choosing David F. Hamilton, a highly regarded federal trial court judge from Indiana, for the appeals court in Chicago.
The article says that Hamilton has the support of both of Indiana's senators and that the administration is hoping his nomination will serve “as a kind of signal” that it wants to move beyond the bruising and nasty confirmation fights of the past:
The administration official said the White House was hoping to reduce the partisan contentiousness of judicial confirmation battles of recent years.
“We would like to put the history of the confirmation wars behind us,” the official said.
Considering this immediate response from Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network, it looks like those on the right have no intention of allowing that to happen:
It's interesting that this is what Obama and the New York Times call a "moderate": Hamilton is a history as a hard-left political activist, and his choice signals that Obama does intend to push extreme liberals onto the bench and politicize the courts as we've never seen before.
Hamilton was a fundraiser for ACORN (nice ACORN payback, Mr. President) and served as vice president for litigation and a board member of the Indiana ACLU. In 1994, when President Clinton nominated him to the district court, the ABA rated him as ‘not qualified,’ apparently of his almost purely political (as opposed to legal and judicial) experience.
Interestingly, he is also the brother-in-law of perhaps the hardest left radical Obama appointee to the Department of Justice, Dawn Johnsen.
Beginning to notice a pattern here?
Indeed we are noticing a pattern here - in fact, it is a pattern that we've been noting for a while in which the Judicial Confirmation Network, a group founded to ensure that President Bush's judges were confirmed, is now leading the fight to make sure President Obama's judges aren't.
