This will be everywhere, but I wanted to point out something that caught my eye in today’s announcement of Sandra Day O’Connor’s retirement:
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said he’s been talking to Democratic leader Harry Reid about nominees for a potential vacancy on the Supreme Court but doesn’t have any inside information on whom President Bush might nominate.
“Have Senator Reid and I talked about individual names? Yes, we have in the privacy of our regular meetings,” Frist said in a speech at the Heritage Foundation. He wouldn’t say whom he and Reid had discussed or characterize their chances in front of the Senate.
Reid later offered three names of people he said would be good for the court: GOP Sens. Mel Martinez of Florida, Mike DeWine of Ohio and Mike Crapo of Idaho. They “are people who serve in the Senate now who are Republicans who I think would be outstanding Supreme Court members,” Reid said.
Reid also said that in a conversation with the justices last week, they said that “they thought what would be a good idea is to start calling people from outside the judicial system.”
Emphasis mine, of course. Had my mouth been full of coffee, I surely would have done a most impressive spit-take upon seeing the mention of Mel Martinez, former HUD Secretary during President Bush’s first term, given his controversial Senate race last year (in which he labeled his Republican primary opponent “the new darling of homosexual extremists”) and his perhaps-muddled involvement in the Terry Schiavo Congressional Fiasco this past spring — not exactly the kind of thoughtful, scholarly public figure one would expect of a nominee to the Supreme Court. Dewine got his JD from Ohio Northern in 1972 and was a prosecuting attorney in Greene County for eight years before his first election as a legislator. No private practice beyond that, so far as I know — he’s either been in the legislative or executive branches of state and federal government since that time. Crapo, at least, was a clerk on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals following his 1977 Harvard JD, but spent less time in practice than Dewine, rising to state senate in 1984.
So, without knowing anything personally about these guys’ judicial philosophies or legal scholarship or anything else one would expect to talk about in a Supreme Court nomination — is Reid serious? Getting someone from outside the judicial system is one thing; nominating career politicians to a job that’s (supposed to be) outside of partisan politics is something else.
Anyone with insight, personal or otherwise, into why any of these folks might be good candidates is invited to respond — I’m genuinely curious. (I should also note that Reid, as Senate Minority Leader, might as well be suggesting Donald Trump for all the weight I expect his comments to be given by the White House, so this is probably all heavily theoretical and hypothetical anyways…)
