In a New York Times article available online now but dated tomorrow, Adam Liptak reports on the new study indicating—shock of shocks!—that the ABA’s judicial-evaluations committee has over time been ideologically biased against conservative nominees. (I previously mentioned the new study briefly at the end of this post; it will be presented at a political-science conference next month, and, I gather, is not available now. Update: The study is available here, though I think that for now you have to sign up as an SSRN member to get access to it.
I’d like to highlight this passage in the article:
Kim J. Askew, the chairwoman of the association’s 15-member Standing Committee on the Federal Judiciary, which performs the evaluations, said her group is independent, hardworking and completely divorced from politics.
“We are an impartial group of lawyers that bring a peer review to the process,” Ms. Askew said. “We are all lawyers. We are officers of the court. We speak the language of the law. We do not consider politics.”
What a sorry falsehood.
Yes, that’s the same Kim Askew who was so “completely divorced from politics” that she continued to serve on the Board of Trustees of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights—a left-wing group that fervently opposed leading nominees of the Bush Administration—while evaluating Bush Administration nominees. And the same Askew who remains so “completely divorced from politics” that she evidently continues to serve as a trustee of that group.
That’s the same Kim Askew who was so “impartial” that her primary evidence that Bush nominee Michael B. Wallace lacked “judicial temperament” was his representation of the Mississippi Republican party in a 1984 congressional redistricting case—a case in which plaintiffs’ counsel was none other than … the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and in which Askew, in evaluating Wallace, was assessing the weight and credibility of comments (and quite possibly even charges) made by LCCR lawyers.
That’s the same Kim Askew who was so devoted to fair process that she violated the ABA’s own procedures in a manner that deprived Wallace of any effective opportunity to contest and refute the charges against him.
That’s the same Kim Askew who was part of former ABA president Michael Greco’s blatant stacking of the ABA committee with members who had partisan left-wing ideological attachments. (See this National Review article of mine and these posts for documentation of these points.)