The American Bar Association (ABA, not to be confused with ABBA) is back! BACK! BACK!!!
Where did they go? you may ask. What did they do? Why should I care? Well let us here at USDemocrazy point you in the right direction.
ABA is back in the business of nominating judges!
What in the world do a bunch of lawyers have to do with nominating judges? That’s the government’s gig right? Well yes, it is the government’s gig. Before you can be a federal judge you have to be nominated by the President and given the OK by the Senate.
But in the past the ABA has been in the rather powerful position of rating prospective judicial candidates. Kind of like ratemyprofessors.com but really official and really important… a practice that has been going on since Eisenhower (i.e. since the last century).
The ABA were sent away for a little while however, as this BLT article talks about. The ABA was kind of given the boot eight years ago, when the Bush administration came to Washington. The Bush people cited this study, saying that the ABA was a little too cozy with liberal candidates.
In response, there is this study (we are giving you a lot of studies to study) which essentially uses a lot of data to say “nuh-uh, do not.” We here at USDemocrazy have no opinion on the subject, we’re just letting you know what went down.
Either way, the Obama administration has brought the ABA back. The NYT’s Adam Liptak writes about the subject here. Conservatives are none too pleased about it, as the ConservativeOutpost clearly demonstrates. But then again, we never really hear about conservatives or liberals jumping for joy at the decisions of their counterparts. Except maybe when listening to ABBA… After all, who doesn’t love “Mamma Mia!”? Don’t answer that.
We here at USDemocrazy want to know what you think! Yeah, there’s politics as usual going on, but whaddya think about any kind of outside organization having such a formal role in a “government” process?
Adam Liptak’s article above also talks about this guy. This is Robert Bork. Besides looking a little scary, he has a lot to say about the subject. He got “Borked” by the ABA.
