“The giveaway here is that there are several current and recent Republican Texas Supreme Court Justices who are actually rather accomplished jurists—former Chief Justice Tom Phillips, current Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson—yet the Bush people came up with the lightweight Owens. The reasons are obvious.”

Is it because she is a woman? and thus more acceptable to a “identity politics” driven process?

The minute I hear any compromise weasel-words out of my reps is the minute I call them on the phone and give them an earful they won’t forget.

Otoh, Kerry was more liberal than Ted Kennedy at -0.954 vs. -0.913.

The point is, Brett, that the GOP’s reaction wasn’t ‘They won, so they get to run the government’, it was “f*ck you!”. And they were off to use every dirty trick they could come up with to win.

1) Since she serves the state, I would be interested in what the Texas Bar Association surveys show.

2) The poll reflects a majority of participants find her outstanding or acceptable.

3) The bar is usually split on judges depending on whether you represent plaintiffs or defendants. The defense bar, although composed of large firms, is usually outnumbered by the number of plaintiff attorneys. Reflecting on observation number two makes it clear that she is attracting numbers from the plaintiffs bar.

Wow, I had no idea that the constitutional system put in place by the framers, with its many counter-majoritarian checks, had been replaced by Parliamentary goverment. Could you please cite the relevant constitutional amdendments? This is a major scoop you’ve got here!

And, why on earth would the Bush administration choose a mediocrity with ‘unappealing moral and political views’, when a more accomplished jurist with similar moral and political views would be, according to Leiter, available? I confess that I don’t find the reasons obvious. I would think that a mediocrity would be perfectly acceptable at the district court level, where, from the perspective of an ideologically motivated administration, presumably one’s predictability would matter more than one’s lack of accomplishment. To a certain extent, the same is true at the Supreme Court—the administration presumably would be more concerned with how the nominee would vote than how persuasive the opinion would be, and, besides, with all those talented clerks it is very difficult to reveal one’s lack of accomplishment. But that’s certainly not obviously the case with nominees to the circuit court of appeals. The administration would presumably want those nominees to be accomplished, both to persuade the other judges on the circuit and to protect rulings from being overturned on further appeal. Maybe Brian could explain to us a bit more about what he’s thinking.

They do, Nick, they do, and far worse. Which is what makes the outrage so laughable. The idea that the Democrats making these arguments really have some kind of disinterested concern that procedures be respected is absurd on it’s face.

The U.S. Congress gave away its powers long ago to corporate interests and the almighty executive branch that every legislator secretly hopes to lead one day, Pentagon thunderbolts in hand. (Who would curb Caesar that might Caesar be?) This “degradation of the democratic dogma” has been the work of more than 50 years of bipartisan goonery, but it has now reached its nadir in the festering pit of blood and bile that is the Bush Regime.

American public life is now almost entirely a facade, a deadening—and deadly—sideshow: the multibillion-dollar electoral circuses, the increasingly frenzied “culture wars,” the epic clash of interest groups across the media battlefields, the endless making, unmaking and remaking of laws. All this sound and fury merely obscures the ugly reality: that there are no effective restraints on the arbitrary exercise of power by the imperial court of President George W. Bush.

Hm, because those numbers are absolutely in line with the political demographics of Houston? Er, no. Houston’s lawyers would have to be pretty damn atypical among Houston residents to skew that way.

On the other hand, the Democratic party’s inability to understand that losing elections means that the other guys get to run the government is getting rather tiresome.

So I suppose you wouldn’t care too much if the Democrats used the same attitude towards rules to declare, say, the Second Amendment null and void? Pish.