Obama, Senate Dems Should Move To Balance Courts — But More Is Needed

You could see it coming minutes after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid “nuked” the procedural filibuster on judicial nominees. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s whiny little hissy, especially the false analogy to FDR when he claimed that President Obama was out to “pack the courts”, was completely predictable.

Somehow, McConnell seems to have forgotten that a generation ago Republicans abandoned the notion of a non-ideological judiciary and acted aggressively to pack the bench with rig.ht-leaning judges through a combination of Republican control of the White House and/or Senate and said party’s abandonment of comity, compromise, and cooperation in the Congress’ “upper house.” I agree with Salon’s Brian Buetler — it is time for the President and the Senate majority to balance the courts:

Obama and Dems can fill every vacancy on the federal bench before their control of the Senate, or his presidency, comes to an end.

But that’s not where the heavy lifting begins:

… [I]t also means liberals ought to now devote more resources toward creating a real progressive counterweight to the conservative legal establishment.Over the course of several decades, the right has nurtured what essentially amounts to a shadow judiciary, composed of conservative legal scholars who disagree, juridically and ideologically, with the post-New Deal consensus. Republican presidents draw upon this class of activists to fill judicial vacancies, creating a modern antipode to liberal judicial activists of previous decades.

As that movement has matured, and in part because that movement has matured, politics has shrunk the ideological sphere from which Democratic presidents have been able to cull liberal jurists. Outspoken progressives, on the periphery of the sphere, have been marginalized. The liberal legal establishment is so scrutinized and subject to so many litmus tests that it has self-selected for timid or self-censoring thinkers, at least in part because it was assumed “liberal activists” would be blocked, and thus never nominated.

That limiting force is gone now. And the hope is its absence draws a new generation of legal minds out of the shadows and onto the bench sooner than later.

Believe it or not, such a counterweight would also strengthen Democratic candidates for office, providing them with a factual basis on which to argue for progressive and liberal policies.

By: dave-dr-gonzo

David Hirsch, a.k.a. Dave "Doctor" Gonzo*, is a renegade record producer, video producer, writer, reformed corporate shill, and still-registered lobbyist for non-one-percenter performing artists and musicians. He lives in a heavily fortified compound in one of Manhattan's less trendy neighborhoods.

* Hirsch is the third person to use the pseudonym, a not-so-veiled tribute to journalist and author Hunter S. Thompson, with the permission of his predecessors Gene Gaudette of American Politics Journal (currently webmaster and chief bottlewasher at Liberaland) and Stephen Meese at Smashmouth Politics.