The president should be commended for succeeding where Biden failed and picking Taibleson.
Before I went to law school I worked at the Family Research Council. While there I was happy to get to know senior fellow, Ken Blackwell. He was politically shrewd and unfailingly kind. Indeed I went on to meet — and later marry — one of his 2006 gubernatorial campaign staffers. I have tremendous respect for Ken Blackwell and am therefore profoundly disappointed to see him publish an outrageous hatchet job against Seventh Circuit nominee Rebecca Taibleson.
Taibleson is the best pick available for this seat. Apart from her sterling credentials and her judicial conservatism, she has an unparalleled track record of persuasion at the Seventh Circuit. But you wouldn’t know this from the op-ed which is a farrago of misstatements, exaggerations, and omissions.
It starts by noting that, “In 2022, Taibleson donated to ActBlue, designated for Joe Manchin, during a time when people were pushing him to run as an alternative to Trump.” The attempt to turn this into an attack on President Trump is clever but misleading: Draft Manchin was in 2023. What was Manchin actually doing in 2022? He was sitting with Republicans at the State of the Union. He was voting to preserve the filibuster (an act about which President Trump said, “Well, it’s a very important thing. He’s doing the right thing, and it’s a very important thing.”). He was taking a victory lap for having killed Build Back Better. This was, of course, four years after he was the only Democrat to vote for Brett Kavanaugh.
Taibleson is also faulted for donating to Judge Bridget Schoenborn in a Waukesha County judicial election. Notice that her opponents can’t call Schoenborn a Democrat, because she wasn’t a Democrat and, in fact, ran as a conservative. Does this sound like a Democrat? “Activist judges that make decisions based on their personal political preferences and are result oriented is detrimental to our system and erodes public trust in the judiciary. When judges base their decisions on the law and constitution, our system is fair and predictable.” How about this? “It’s me. A conservative judge is one who follows the rule of law, who acknowledges their limited role in government, who does not let their personal beliefs seep into the court proceedings, and who starts with the text of the statute when making decisions.” Would a Democrat judge say of liberal Judge Lynn Adelman, “I do not agree with his politics”?
No, the real problem is that Taibleson’s husband, Ben Taibleson, has, in the past, donated to Democrats. (He also apparently wrote a liberal book review.) Is this really the line of attack Ken Blackwell thinks it is? During his gubernatorial race, a favorite game of the Ohio press corps was trying to ferret out the ways he and his wife — then the superintendent of schools for Cincinnati — disagreed. I have no idea if they did or they didn’t disagree on issues. What I do know is that the Blackwells refused to talk to the press about it. So Rosa Blackwell was off limits but Ben Taibleson is fair game?
The op-ed proceeds to get Taibleson’s work history wrong. We’re told she “intentionally interned for the Obama D.O.J.” It’s not uncommon for good law students to intern at the DOJ regardless of party. That Taibleson did so in 2009 means she was probably hired by the George W. Bush Justice Department. Depending on when she was hired, she may have intended to intern for the McCain DOJ! I was at the Family Research Council at the time, and I remember hearing about how all the Justice-Department components in late 2008 were hiring right-wingers for the 2009 summer intern season in order to leave a surprise for the next administration.
Regardless, do you know who did intentionally intern at the Obama DOJ? Judge Whitney Hermandorfer. In fact, do you know who chose to work for the Obama DOJ? Judge Emil Bove. Bove was even hired by Preet Bharara and that didn’t stop me from openly supporting him. This is a meaningless datapoint.
While we’re discussing internships, though, the op-ed leaves out that Taibleson interned in 2004 at the President’s Council on Bioethics, run at the time by the great Dr. Leon Kass. Before that she volunteered on ambulances in Israel during the Second Intifada. Not your standard Yale-undergrad internship, and presumably of interest to an admirably rock-solid Zionist like Ken Blackwell.
The op-ed goes on to say that Taibleson “served on the defense team for a case brought by the Brown County Taxpayers Association challenging Biden’s student loan forgiveness policy” while working for Solicitor General Prelogar. This is simply false. Taibleson, as the appellate chief in the Eastern District of Wisconsin is automatically added by the Seventh Circuit clerk’s office on all appeals against the U.S. Government. This included an appeal in one of the student-loan jubilee cases. She wasn’t on the team. She did nothing in the case. She certainly wasn’t working for Elizabeth Prelogar. She was likely added by a computer algorithm. Regardless, the case was voluntarily dismissed with no briefing so Taibleson couldn’t have taken any position in the case one way or the other, let alone “served on the defense team.”
The op-ed gives the back of the hand to Taibleson’s support for Brett Kavanaugh, but this elides history. Taibleson came to D.C. to testify on Kavanaugh’s behalf — having just recently given birth — and more importantly stood by him publicly as Democrats did everything they could to destroy him. As a young woman, she was a particularly important advocate for Kavanaugh in the press. This was a key, perhaps generational fight against the left, and Taibleson was right there at the barricades with those of us whose job it was to man them. She didn’t have to be.
That she was a clerk for Justice Scalia — during the term where he issued some of his most memorable dissents, from NFIB v. Sebelius to Arizona v. U.S. — apparently gets her no credit. This is because Scalia “was known to hire a ‘counterclerk’” and some of his clerks have gone on to be liberals. What an insult to Justice Scalia. Leaving aside the fact that he had essentially abandoned his practice of always hiring a counterclerk by the time Taibleson clerked for him, there would be no conservative legal movement as we know it today were it not for Justice Scalia and the clerks he sent forth into the legal profession. Even today: The current Solicitor General, winning cases weekly for Trump at the Supreme Court? Scalia clerk. His deputy? Scalia clerk. His other deputy? Scalia clerk.
Ignored entirely is Taibleson’s work in the Trump Solicitor General’s office, which included defending President Trump’s ability to use his Twitter account unimpeded, and supporting the free-association rights of the St. Thomas More Law Center as they were under attack from the attorney general of California.
(Speaking of St. Thomas More, remember Sarah Pitlyk? The pro-life lawyer at the St. Thomas More Society who is now a judge in St. Louis? It’s not hard to find her doing speaking events with Taibleson.)
The op-ed, instead, focuses on Taibleson’s time in the Biden Solicitor General’s office, getting the dates of her service there wrong. She left in June 2021 — at the end of the school year — not serving “all the way through 2022.” Indeed the 2022 claim is hard to source anywhere but the left-wing Alliance for Justice. Is this what conservatives are relying on for their research?
While it’s true that Senator Tammy Baldwin’s commissioners (or at least two of them) supported sending Taibleson’s name to the president, it’s not clear that she actually has “liberal Senator Tammy Baldwin’s support,” and I very much doubt that she’ll get it. What she does have is conservative Senator Ron Johnson’s support. Did Ken Blackwell reach out to Senator Johnson to see what he thinks about this? Why would a senator with a 100 percent rating from Family Research Council Action support a social liberal for the court of appeals?
But, you see, Taibleson donated a paltry sum to the Milwaukee Jewish Federation and they support LGBT rights. The Milwaukee Jewish Federation is the blanket Jewish social-services organization in Milwaukee, sort of like a Jewish version of Catholic Charities. Should we think that Brett Kavanaugh supports open borders because he volunteered for Catholic Charities? That will be news to the illegal aliens getting caught up in Los Angeles’s renewed ICE sweeps. The fact is that you can infer malice in most any charitable act if only you choose to approach it in bad faith.
The op-ed ends by saying that there are “two very strong, highly credentialed and proven conservative choices” available. Is that where this is coming from? I hope not. In my experience, when a nominee is defeated, the last people who are later considered for judgeships are the people who participated in the defenestration. No White House counsel and no senator is going to reward Brutus. If I thought the op-ed might be referring to me, I would refute it loudly and proudly with my support for the president’s choice.
The op-ed is right that the Seventh Circuit is an important circuit but wrong that Taibleson is a weak pick. Indeed she’s just the person that court needs and is very likely to move it noticeably to the right. The reason why conservatives even have a puncher’s chance in the Seventh Circuit is because the Biden White House erred repeatedly by passing over smart, persuasive liberals as nominees in favor of the confrontational left-wingers his activist base demanded.
The president should be commended for succeeding where Biden failed and picking Taibleson. He should trust his actual advisers and not false friends feeding him a draft of sour grapes.