WPCNR White Plains Law Journal. Commentary By Doris Sassower. October 17, 2005:
President Bush’s recent nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court of Harriet Miers and John Roberts reflect serious flaws in the federal judicial nominating process, commencing with the so-called “vetting” of the nomination before it is made public by the White House.
Ms. Miers and for that matter now Chief Justice Roberts, however qualified, and apart from any ideological considerations, could not be deemed unquestionably entitled to the lifetime jobs to which they were nominated, let alone the best qualified, as CJA believes our taxpaying public is entitled to. Our citizenry should not have to finance “on-the-job” training of a judicial nominee, simply because she or he is a friend of the President and closely allied to his right-wing conservative views.
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With all due respect, the People, have a right to expect that the Chief Justice of our nation’s highest court would be chosen from the ranks of the U.S. Supreme Court pool itself, if not from the pool of Circuit Court Chief Judges throughout the country, with seniority gained from long years of experience deciding federal cases involving constitutional questions.
It surely must be demoralizing to all those judges that someone without such expertise should be chosen for so pre-eminent and life-determining a position. Even more so in the case of Miers, who has no judicial track record at all, no constitutional law specialty, and whose obvious prime qualification is her longtime friendship with Southern Methodist University classmate Laura Bush, which gained her the position of counsel to the President, a job encompassing the so-called “vetting” of all White House judicial nominees, her own included.
Unfortunately for our citizenry, the “vetting process” does not work, mainly because the President has arrogated too much power to himself in making nominations for the many vacancies that occur on the federal district and appellate courts, as well as the District of Columbia courts. He has no right to abuse that power by politically-motivated choices which by any objective standard are contrary to the best interests of our taxpaying citizenry. Neither do the Senate Committees involved in confirmation of presidential judicial nominees have the right to just “rubber-stamp” those nominations, based on superficial information, as they are all too prone to do.
A glaring example of the abject failure of the “vetting” process to protect the public from unfit judicial nominees is seen in the case of President Bush’s appointment of Brian Fernandez Holeman, then 46 years of age, to the DC Superior Court on April 22, 2003, the very same day CJA Coordinator, Elena Ruth Sassower, (a resident of White Plains) was handcuffed, arrested and locked up in the DC Jail for exercising 1st Amendment rights by respectfully requesting to present “citizen opposition” at a US Senate Judiciary Committee Public Hearing considering the President’s nomination of Richard C. Wesley to the 2nd Circuit US Court of Appeals.
The lawyer whose duty it was to “vett” the Holeman nomination was none other than Harriet Miers’ predecessor White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez, recently rewarded by the President with appointment as our U.S. Attorney General. CJA checked into Judge Holeman’s background after his barbaric on-the-job performance as the judge presiding over the case of USA v. Elena Ruth Sassower, in which he sentenced CJA’s patriotic and valiant Coordinator to a jail term of six months on a transparently trumped-up criminal charge of “Disruption of Congress. Background documentation is available from our website at http://www.judgewatch.org/DisruptionofCongresscase.htm
After then White House counsel Gonzalez had endorsed the “vetting” of Holeman’s nomination, it was unanimously confirmed at a pro forma Senate Committee Hearing, where he was introduced as “well-qualified,” by a respected DC Congresswoman – notwithstanding Holeman not only had no judicial experience, had never clerked for a judge and had no law school distinctions, but also no criminal litigation experience as a practitioner.
More than that, our research showed that Holden had lied about his credentials in ways any reasonably competent investigator could have uncovered. This included the fact that Holeman was not licensed to practice law in California, was not an Associate at the prominent law firm there, as he claimed, which did not list him as an Associate in that firm’s professional directory listing. After two years at the firm, Holeman went to work for the next four years in a non-legal position as claims man for the firm’s insurance clients, supportive of the belief that he did not pass the California bar. The data Holeman himself provided in advance of his nomination showed also that he had nine (9) different legal employers in 17 years after law school graduation, winding up as a sole practitioner at the time of his appointment.
Is it any wonder that one so beholden to the President for his clearly unmerited judgeship would be biased and abusive toward anyone whose name is synonymous with public interest advocacy dedicated to ending such flagrant perversion of the judicial nominating process?
The numerous well-documented complaints by CJA and others against Judge Holeman, filed with the DC Commission on Judicial Tenure, for his flagrant misconduct as a judge and as a judicial nominee, that tax-funded public agency designed to police the conduct of District of Columbia judges and judicial nominees, resulted in their typical “hands-off” dismissal of the complaints as “beyond the statutory authority of the Commission. So much for the “vetting” process as a mode of judicial selection and for judicial misconduct commissions which, rather than redressing legitimate citizen complaints of judicial abuse, are complicitous in the misconduct complained of.
Doris L. Sassower, Director
Member U.S. Supreme Court Bar
