1.3 Million

We go round and round in circles, don’t we? Now ACORN is under attack, despite their non-partisan effort to register voters; they are, of course, by majority not WEALTHY voters signing on, who already have all the access they need. And consequently, not [by and large] Republican voters.

Stunningly, 1.3 million of them are newly registered — and this makes McCain and Palin nuts, but then … they’re both squirrels, hustling their repressive nut as best they can.

This circle, by the way, takes us back around to the stolen election of 2000, the next in 2004 and … lest we forget … Ninegate and the bounced attorney’s that wouldn’t pursue bogus voter fraud cases. We’ll look at ACORN and the assault on the vote today, with reads on justice as bonus offerings.

We’re building a ROUND table for this nation, now — and EVERYONE will sit at it, or NONE will!

And if you still need a rationale to select Obama/Biden this year … think “JUDGES.”

Jude

Attacks on ACORN Based Not on Facts, But on Fear of 1.3 Million Poor People Registering
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., HuffPo
October 10, 2008

The Republicans tried to make fun of Barack Obama as a community organizer at their national convention in Minnesota, which I guess just goes to show how little Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have to fear from right-wing “humor.”

Now they’ve gone further: Now they’re attacking ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), one of the strongest, hardest-working, most dedicated community organizations in both Chicago and in 40 states across the U.S.

Why are they after ACORN? Well, I’m sure they’re going to come up with a lot of “reasons” in the coming days. But the real reason is obvious: Because ACORN, along with Project Vote, just announced that they had successfully registered 1.3 million poor people this year.

Get that? 1.3 million, including 148,000 in Pennsylvania, 152,000 in Florida, 217,000 in Michigan, and 238,000 in Ohio. No wonder the GOP is up in arms. They’re scared of too many poor people preparing to vote this year.

In the last week, the right wing has tried to blame ACORN for the collapse of the globalized financial system–yeah, that’s a viable argument. They got excited because they found a some possible fake registration forms in Florida, which predictably led to a bunch of whining from the party that stole an entire presidency from Al Gore by blocking vote counts, mischaracterizing voters as felons, refusing to recount entire counties, sending congressional staff down to riot and intimidate volunteer vote-counters, and topped it all off with the most partisan, badly-reasoned, illegitimate Supreme Court decision since Plessy v. Ferguson. A decision so illegitimate that the partisan majority, to their eternal discredit, themselves damned by writing into their own decision that it should never be used as a precedent for any other court ruling.

This week, the right-wing is hyperventilating because apparently Democratic election officials raided an ACORN office after they found the names of some Dallas Cowboy football players among the 80,000 new registration forms that ACORN helped to get done in Nevada.

Obviously it’s not right for a fake “Tony Romo” to be registered in Las Vegas, so someone was probably playing a not-very-funny joke, or trying to pad their registration numbers to get paid a little more money rather than doing the hard work in the hot Nevada sun that helping voters to register requires, or maybe a provocateur was setting up ACORN for some bad press. But remember the basic point–it’s not voter fraud unless someone shows up at the voting booth on election day and tries to pass himself off as “Tony Romo.” And who would try to do that? No one is going to be that stupid.

The truth is, the main voter fraud efforts going on in my lifetime–and I was born the week of the Selma march in 1965–have been repeated conservative attempts, far too many of them successful, to demonize and suppress the vote of African-Americans and Latinos in election after election, a history for which former RNC Chair Ken Mehlman actually apologized a few years ago, while promising the GOP would no longer engage in such tactics.

So they stole an election from Gore, made the Department of Justice into an outfit for partisan hacks, allowed New Orleans to drown, lied us into a war against a country that did not threaten us, replaced science with bad ideology, indebted our grandchildren to China, and turned our banking system into a deregulated casino–but thank the Lord that “Tony Romo” will not be able to sneak in to vote in Nevada next month.

This time, there are already fake flyers mysteriously appearing on the streets of minority areas of Philadelphia, illegal voter purges in numerous states, “caging” tricks, threats of using home foreclosure lists to strike voters from the rolls, and “black box” electronic vote-counting systems under the control of private companies–and we haven’t even gotten to election day!

Meanwhile, I say thank you, ACORN. Thank you, Project Vote, for taking our democracy seriously enough to try to include 1.3 million more poor people in a more perfect union. ++

The Fraud Of Fraud
digby, Hullabaloo
10/11/2008

It’s becoming clear that the fraudulent GOP “vote fraud” project is up and running at full speed and will likely be a huge story for well beyond the election. Rick Perlstein had an interaction with John Fund recently, who said right out that Democrats didn’t believe in election law and would try to count illegal votes. He’s selling books so perhaps his hyperbole is just salesmanship, but his prediction that a close election will be thrown into doubt because of Republican efforts to challenge every provisional ballot sounds quite plausible to me.

The process of turning ACORN into a terrorist sleeper cell has begun and I see little hope that they aren’t going to be successful. The press is clearly fascinated by the right wing caricature of a group of shiftless “community organizers” trading crack for Obama votes in the inner city and have done exactly zero research into the issue, so the reporting has been hysterical.

I have written many times about this report (pdf) from 2004 about the history of Republican vote suppression efforts and I urge you to take the time to read the whole thing if you haven’t. This has been a tool of conservatives of all parties since the beginning of the Republic, but it’s only been since the 1980s that the Republicans professionalized it with the formation of the Republican National Lawyers Association. The report shows that the Jesse Jackson campaign’s successful new voter registration efforts was a particular impetus for GOP efforts to promote the false allegation that there is systematic voter fraud in the land.

This is the first election where we may see the full effect of this project. The Republican National Lawyers association were a vital part of the Florida recount (they even give out an award to certain lawyers featuring some of the famous Florida chads) but this may be where the true genius of the project lies. We are going to have what appears to be a substantial Democratic victory by an African American with a strong minority constituency. The totals may not be close. But by ratcheting up this spectre of “voter fraud” in advance, they are helping to lay the groundwork for delegitimizing a president Obama in the eyes of a large number of Americans.

That the media is running after this story like a bunch of toddlers gleefully chasing puppies is typical, but still disheartening. It was only a couple of weeks ago that a special prosecutor was named in the US Attorney firings after the Inspector General found that that some of them, notably David Iglesias, were fired because they failed to prosecute bogus voter fraud cases. In light of that you would think that the press would be a bit skeptical of voter fraud allegations by Republicans.

Instead you have this:

CNN’s Drew Griffin took his network’s Special Investigations Unit to Lake County, IN yesterday in an attempt to document election problems in the area. Did he discuss the active and legitimate voter suppression campaign taking place there, in which local Republicans are blocking early voting in three Democratic leaning cities? Not at all. Instead, he focused on faulty registration cards submitted by the current bete noir of the conservative movement, the community organizing group ACORN. What’s worse, his report (and most other media accounts) grossly misrepresented the intent and professionalism of ACORN’s registration efforts. (video at the link)

In the report, Ruthann Hoagland, a Republican member of the Lake Co. Board of Elections, tells Griffin that ACORN submitted 5,000 new registrations in the past two weeks. But during the verification process, employees found that about half were fraudulent, including multiple forms turned in with the same handwriting, one signed “Johns, Jimmy” using the address of a Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in Crown Point, and others with the name of registrants that are now dead. Nationwide, registrar’s offices have come across similar problems in recent days.

What Griffin fails to note, however, is that ACORN made very clear that some registrations they gathered from canvassers in Lake County may have been faulty. An ACORN spokesmen explained this in an October 7 press release:

ACORN flags and turns in three kinds of cards, those that it can verify, those that are incomplete, and those that it flags as problematic. It turns those in labeled in a special way and are very conservative in terms of what it flags as problematic. It has stacks of problematic cover sheets. [...]

The Lake County Board knew about the questionable registrations today because ACORN flagged them for the board. For example, the Jimmy John’s card is one that a caller had flagged and labeled as problematic. ACORN can get that caller to talk to the press.

According to Regina Harris, the Director of Registrations for Lake County, this claim checks out. “It’s certainly true. They did have three batches separated.” she told me this morning. “There was a pile they knew were good, there was some they said had missing info — like no voter ID number or a missing birthday — and another batch they called ’suspicious.’ ”

Why would ACORN submit registration forms it had deemed “suspicious”? Because under most state laws, voter registration organizations are required to turn in all the forms they receive. In a phone conversation today, ACORN press coordinator Charles Jackson confirmed that this is the case in Indiana.

So what explains all the faulty registration forms? There are two probable causes. One is that some registration forms can contain simple errors. That means the registrant didn’t intend to subvert the election process, but rather just made an honest mistake.

The other scenario involves the canvassers themselves. If employees want to boost their performance in the eyes of their boss or simply don’t want to do the work of finding legitimate new voters, they could turn in forged or faulty registration forms.* This is illegal and can wreak havoc on registrar’s offices, but there’s no evidence these imaginary people turn around and vote in November.

Given Indiana’s strict voter ID law, it would actually be next to impossible for anyone to cast a ballot under the name of a submarine sandwich chain or a dead person.

But these facts haven’t stopped conservative critics and some in the media from incorrectly implying that ACORN’s faulty registrations prove the organization is trying to forge votes and steal the election in November. An editorial in the Investor’s Business Daily said, “[John] McCain would be wise to start preparing a challenge to voter registration rolls should he lose the race in a close contest.”
CNN even set up Griffin’s segment with a graphic that read “Voter Fraud?”

I think it’s pretty clear at this point that he is.

McCain’s ad featuring ACORN (which dday discussed yesterday) has been removed from Youtube. But here’s the script:

JOHN MCCAIN: I’m John McCain and I approve this message.

ANNCR: Who is Barack Obama?

A man with “a political baptism performed at warp speed.”

Vast ambition.

After college, he moved to Chicago.

Became a community organizer.

There, Obama met Madeleine Talbot, part of the Chicago branch of ACORN.

He was so impressive that he was asked to train the ACORN staff.

What did ACORN in Chicago engage in?

Bullying banks.

Intimidation tactics.

Disruption of business.

ACORN forced banks to issue risky home loans.

The same types of loans that caused the financial crisis we’re in today.

No wonder Obama’s campaign is trying to distance him from the group, saying, “Barack Obama Never Organized with ACORN.”

But Obama’s ties to ACORN run long and deep.

He taught classes for ACORN.

They even endorsed him for President.

But now ACORN is in trouble.

REPORTER: There are at least 11 investigations across the country involving thousands of potentially fraudulent ACORN forms.

ANNCR: Massive voter fraud.

And the Obama campaign paid more than $800,000 to an ACORN front for get out the vote efforts.

Pressuring banks to issue risky loans.

Nationwide voter fraud.

Barack Obama.

Bad judgment. Blind ambition.

Too risky for America.

It looks right now as if the election might not be close enough for the Republicans to make a plausible case for outright theft of the election through voter fraud. But as I said, they are certainly laying the groundwork for a propaganda campaign to delegitimize Barack Obama. The beauty of the voter fraud fraud is that they win even when they lose.

The conservatives’ long term goal is to make citizens so cynical about the electoral system that they just don’t vote. the fewer people who participate in democracy the easier it is for the aristocracy to maintain control. ++

2008: The Difficulty Stealing it this Time
New 2008 Democratic Primary Voters Are The Key to Election Protection
Michael Collins, “Scoop” Independent News via Smirking Chimp
October 9, 2008

(Wash. DC) There’s one major obstacle blocking a theft of the 2008
presidential election. It’s highly significant and challenges even the most
devious minds. That obstacle is “net new” Democratic primary voters in 2008. “Net new” Democratic primary voters represent the difference between primary turnout in 2004 and 2008. More on that in a moment.

If you think that 2000 and 2004 were free and fair elections and that the idea of election fraud is specious, that’s fine. You might want to review some of the following.

Al Gore won the 2000 election by over 500,000 votes. He did not become the president and was denied a recount by the court that made Bush the president. Stolen election. Case closed…

[open link to finish article and see the nifty graphs!]

The Truth About ACORN’s Voter Registration Drive
Bertha Lewis and Steve Kest, Common Dreams
Friday, October 10, 2008

Election Day is less than a month away, and our efforts to make sure that low-income and minority voters have a voice and vote on November 4th are in full swing. Unfortunately, just as we’ve seen in previous election cycles, the more success we have in empowering these voters, the more attacks we have to fend off from partisan forces making unfounded accusations to disparage our work and help maintain the status quo of an unbalanced electorate. We want to take this opportunity to separate the facts of our successes from the falsehoods of our attackers.

On Monday, October 6, as voter registration deadlines passed in most states, ACORN completed the largest, most successful nonpartisan voter registration drive in history. In partnership with the nonpartisan organization Project Vote, we helped register over 1.3 million low-income, minority, and young voters in a total of 21 states. Highlights of this success include:

We collected over 151,000 registrations in Florida, 153,000 in Pennsylvania, 215,000 in Michigan, and nearly 250,000 in Ohio.

An estimated 60-70 percent of our applicants are people of color.

At least HALF of all are registrations are from young people between 18-29.

We are proud of this unprecedented success, and grateful to everyone who supported us in this massive effort, from our funders and partners to the literally thousands of hardworking individuals across the country who dedicated themselves to the cause and conducted the difficult work of registering 1.3 million Americans, one voter at a time.

And this work is far from over: now begins our effort mobilize these new
voters around local and national issues, getting them to the polls and
helping to channel their commitment and conviction into an ongoing movement for change in our communities.

As The Nation pointed out recently, ACORN’s success in registering millions of low-income and minority voters has made it “something of a right-wing bogeyman.” Though ACORN believes that the right to vote is not, and should never be, a partisan issue, attacks from groups threatened by our historic success continue to come, motivated by partisan politics and often perpetuated by the media without full investigation of the facts. As a result, there have been a few recent stories about investigations of former ACORN workers for turning in incomplete, erroneous, or fraudulent voter registration applications. Predictably, partisan forces have tried to use these isolated incidents to incite fear of the “bogeyman” of “widespread voter fraud.” But we want to take this opportunity to set the record straight and tell you a few facts to show how these incidents really exemplify everything that ACORN is doing right:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field, but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card, so there is NO incentive for them to falsify cards. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the relatively rare cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

Fact: No charges have ever been brought against ACORN itself. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes.

Fact: Voter fraud by individuals is extremely rare, and incredibly
difficult. There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work.

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN’s good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to
suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony
registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible
numbers of people are registered and allowed to vote, so there is also NO incentive to “disrupt the system” with phony cards.

Fact: Similar accusations were made, and attacks launched, against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. These attacks were not only groundless, they have since been exposed as part of the U.S. Attorneygate scandal and revealed to be part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression.

These are the facts, and the truth is that a relatively small group of
political operatives are trying to orchestrate hysteria about “voter fraud”
and manufacture public outrage that they can use to further suppress the votes of millions of low-income and minority Americans.

These tactics are nothing new, and history has shown that they will come to nothing. We’ll continue to weather the storm, as we’ve done for years, and we’ll continue to share the truth about our work and express pride about our accomplishments.

Most importantly, we want to assure you that this good work continues,
unabated and undeterred. ACORN will not be intimidated, we will not be
provoked, and in this important moment in history we will not allow anyone to distract us from these vital efforts to empower our constituencies and our communities to speak for themselves. If the partisan political machines are afraid of low-income and minority voters, they’re going to have to do a lot better than coming after ACORN.

After all, there are now at least 1.3 million more of them, and they will
not be silenced. They’re taking an interest, and taking a stand, and they’ll be taking their concerns to the voting booth in November.

And ACORN will be here, to make sure that the voices of these Americans are heard, on Election Day and for every day to come. ++

Bertha Lewis is a senior organizer for ACORN. Steve Kest is ACORN’s Executive Director. ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is the nation’s largest community organization of low- and moderate-income families, working together for social justice and stronger communities.

On Obama, Acorn and Voter Registration
STEPHANIE STROM, NYT
October 10, 2008

GOP lawmaker compares ACORN to the KKK
David Edwards and Nick Juliano, Raw Story
Friday October 10, 2008

UPDATED: ACORN Fraud Story FAKE GOP Scam
alicescheshirecat, Daily Kos
Oct 10, 2008
[article snipped below -- open for full text]

All day the mainstream news has been reporting the so-called Voter Fraud on the part of ACORN that has registered over 1.2 million people to vote in low income areas of the country.

THE FACTS: - all people who do voter registration are REQUIRED BY LAW to turn in the forms that they receive, whether they are valid or not.

What ACORN does when they register someone to vote is then turn around and verify that the person is who they say they are. When the person can’t be found ACORN then flags them as suspicious. When they turn them into boards of elections (which again they are require to do) those suspicious ones are flagged so BOE’s can deal with them accordingly…

As with Ohio, the raid on Missouri was also a scam. Read up on the election protection site BradBlog

PLEASE GET THE FACTS STRAIGHT!

ACORN verifies every single registration form, and when they can’t, they
flag them as potentially fraudulent before turning them into officials, as
they are required by law!

PLEASE help push this story around as much as possible to encourage others to get their facts straight… ++

Brace yourself: GOP can’t win unless it suppresses the vote
Robert C. Koehler, Smirking Chimp
October 9, 2008

ACORN Is Not the Nut Here
David Swanson, Smirking Chimp
October 10, 2008

From 2000 to 2003 I was the communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I don’t know whether to be sorry or relieved that I don’t have my old job now.

ACORN has been through some scandals of its own making, but it is currently all over the news because of a pair of absolutely fraudulent and nationally coordinated attacks.

One of these attacks involves accusations of voter fraud. But, of course, “voter fraud” almost doesn’t exist, and federal prosecutors have lost their jobs because they couldn’t find evidence of its existence to satisfy the Bush White House. In fact, the accusations against ACORN are not about voting, but about voter registration… [open link to finish article] ++

bonus

The Roadblock Crew
A new prosecutor should put obstructionist White House officials on her interview list.
Washington Post
Sunday, October 5, 2008

BURIED IN a lengthy report about the firing of nine U.S. attorneys is the
disturbing explanation of how the White House blocked Justice Department investigators from obtaining pertinent documents.

The White House Counsel’s Office, in declining to turn over certain
documents to the Justice Department’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), argued that President Bush had a “very strong confidentiality interest” in keeping private — even from the administration’s top law enforcement agency — information contained in those documents. The president, however, did not have concerns about sharing them with certain officials at Justice. For example, in 2007 the White House passed along to then-Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) copies of a memorandum that included detailed descriptions of the involvement of administration officials in the dismissals; the OLC, according to the report, said that it had been ordered by the White House not to turn over the document to OIG/OPR investigators.

The administration later relented but submitted a copy so heavily redacted that investigators said it was virtually useless. Investigators concluded that the administration’s stonewalling “hindered” its investigation.

The report also lays out the reasons — or lack thereof — offered by former administration officials Karl Rove and Harriet E. Miers for refusing to speak with the investigators. Mr. Rove simply declined to submit to an interview — despite the fact that the White House Counsel’s Office
encouraged current and former officials to do so. Unlike Ms. Miers, he
offered no explanation. The report explains that Ms. Miers’s lawyer was
worried that if she spoke with Justice investigators she could undermine the claim of executive privilege invoked by the president to prevent her
testimony in a parallel congressional inquiry. It is not clear whether the
claim of executive privilege would have been damaged; the Justice
Department, after all, is part of the executive branch. But Ms. Miers
apparently felt that she would have been in a politically untenable position when arguing against cooperation with Congress, especially because it’s likely that her testimony to the Justice Department would have been part of a public report.

These considerations should not be obstacles for Nora R. Dannehy, the acting U.S. attorney in Connecticut, who was recently appointed special prosecutor for the matter. Ms. Dannehy comes to her assignment with considerably more legal muscle than the Justice Department investigators have; for one, she has the power to summon current and former administration officials — a power Justice lawyers did not enjoy. Mr. Rove and Ms. Miers should be at the top of her list. Ms. Dannehy must also be unflinching in her examination of whether current or former administration officials obstructed justice or made false statements. ++

Correcting an injustice
David Iglesias, Baltimore Sun
October 6, 2008

As one of the nine U.S. attorneys fired by the Bush administration in 2006, I have been carefully monitoring the train wreck that followed. I am not happy to see the enormous damage that has been done to the Department of Justice, a once-venerated institution. But I am pleased that the internal investigations, including the report released last week by the department, have fully vindicated what my colleagues and I have been saying for the last two years: Improper politicization has crippled the department, and the Bush administration’s culture of partisanship and loyalty above all has done a terrible disservice to this country.

Little did I know when I received my Pearl Harbor Day phone call from the Justice Department in December 2006, asking for my resignation, that almost two years would pass until I would find out the extent of the improper politicization. My good friend and fired colleague, John McKay, said it best when he stated, immediately after he received the phone call, that this would “not end in the way they think it will.”

After the public release of the most recent internal investigations, it can
no longer be said that there are mere “allegations” of improper
politicization but rather, now, official findings of fact. Justice was
compromised. Not only were my colleagues and I not insulated from politics - as we should have been in our jobs as prosecutors - but we were fired for the most partisan of reasons. In my case, it was because powerful Republicans in Congress and the White House believed that I had not done my duty as a Republican to bring criminal charges against Democrats in the run-up to the 2006 elections.

Our firings were just one part of the scandal. Another investigation,
released over the summer, showed that the department’s “honors program” for young law school graduates was the victim of illegal political screening. Lots of bright young applicants were turned away from career jobs because they answered questions in a way that was considered politically suspect or, in some cases, because they had listed organizations thought too liberal for the neocons at main Justice.

Then came the findings that career immigration judges were similarly
screened for their political views. Career federal prosecutors also were
screened, in yet another violation of the law.

Why is this such a big deal? Because justice has to be blind to politics for our system to work. America stands for the venerable axiom of “equal justice under the law.” The damage done to the Justice Department by young, idealistic zealots such as Monica Goodling and Michael Elston led our current attorney general, Michael B. Mukasey, to appoint a prosecutor last week to continue the investigation.

Some people have argued that it was acceptable for the Bush administration to fire us because we were “political appointees” hired and serving at the will of the president. The death blow to this school of thought came when the report was made public. The 358-page tome systematically described a “fundamentally flawed” system of slipshod, ad hoc job termination based on rumor and innuendo rather than evidence, one in which no due diligence was ever exercised by Department of Justice leadership before asking my colleagues and me to resign.

The scathing investigation concluded that the credibility of the Justice
Department was severely damaged. In my case, every alleged reason for my dismissal was discredited by the investigation. I strongly support the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate whether criminal laws were violated by members of Congress, White House officials or former leaders of the Justice Department. I hope the newly appointed counsel is able to subpoena evidence that was denied to the inspector general’s office.

The investigation summarized it best: “Once U.S. attorneys assume office, they are obligated to put political considerations aside when making prosecutive judgments on individual cases. Inevitably, their decisions may displease the political officials who initially supported them. If a U.S. attorney must maintain the confidence of home-state political officials to avoid removal, regardless of the merits of the U.S. attorney’s prosecutorial decisions, respect for the Department of Justice’s independence and integrity will be severely damaged and every U.S. attorney’s prosecutorial decisions will be suspect.”

If the rule of law means anything, it means that all are subject to it.
Prosecutors, operating independently and in a nonpartisan manner, are the cornerstone of our criminal justice system. Take that away and you are sprinting down the road to perdition. ++

David Iglesias was the U.S. attorney for the district of New Mexico from
2001 and 2007. He is the author of “In Justice: Inside the Scandal that
Rocked the Bush Administration.” This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Voters: ‘Judges Matter’
SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, NYT
October 6, 2008

CINCINNATI - When he ran for office in 2000, President Bush vowed to appoint “more judges like Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia.” On Monday, the opening day of the Supreme Court’s new term, Mr. Bush came to the critical swing state of Ohio to remind Americans that he has lived up to that promise - and to make the case, if only obliquely, that so would Senator

“The lesson is clear: Judges matter to every American,” Mr. Bush told
members of the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group, after ticking off a list of narrowly decided Supreme Court decisions, including two he regards favorably - one upholding a ban on the medical procedure critics call partial-birth abortion, and another overturning a ban on gun ownership in the District of Columbia.

“Our belief in judicial restraint is shared by the vast majority of the
American people,” Mr. Bush said, adding that he had kept his pledge to “seek judges who would faithfully interpret the Constitution - not use the courts to invent laws or dictate social policy.”

Legal experts say Mr. Bush has had a profound impact on the judiciary,
reshaping it with a conservative tilt that could long outlast his
administration. But with the Supreme Court split 5 to 4 on many decisions, both parties agree that it will take another vacancy - to be filled, presumably, by the next president - to either seal or undo that legacy.

Mr. McCain has vowed to follow Mr. Bush’s approach in appointing judges, and in previewing Monday’s remarks, the White House circulated a document saying Mr. Bush would “reiterate that America deserves a president who will appoint strong, well-qualified judges.” In the end, though, Mr. Bush steered clear of mentioning Mr. McCain or the presidential race, but made the link implicitly, saying, “The selection and confirmation of good judges should be a high priority for every American.”

Mr. Bush has appointed more than one-third of the judges now on the federal bench - including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito, both well-regarded conservatives on the Supreme Court - and the audience here greeted him warmly, applauding loudly at the mention of the justices’ names.

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, responded to Mr. Bush’s speech with a statement in which he said the impact of Mr. Bush’s appointments “is being harshly felt by ordinary Americans” as the courts increasingly side with “big corporations at the expense of workers, consumers, injured Americans and investors.”

Mr. Bush has put considerable energy into fighting with Senate Democrats over judges. In 2005, a procedural dispute over Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees nearly paralyzed the Senate. It was resolved only after a bipartisan group of 14 senators, including Mr. McCain, stepped forward to broker a deal in which some nominees would be approved in exchange for a promise from Mr. Bush to consult more closely with senators before naming judges.

On Monday, Mr. Bush accused the Senate of using partisan “tricks and
gimmicks” to block his nominees. Complaining of the “broken confirmation
process,” he called on the Senate to use its lame-duck session to confirm pending nominations.

“If Democrats truly seek a more productive and cooperative relationship in Washington,” he said, “then they have a perfect opportunity to prove it, by giving these nominees the up or down vote they deserve.”

Judicial appointments are an important issue to Mr. Bush’s conservative
base, and Republicans have successfully used the issue in past years to
build enthusiasm for their candidates. This year, with the focus intensely on the economy and, to a lesser extent, Iraq, it is unclear how much attention Americans are paying to the courts. ++

Next president will reshape U.S. courts from top to bottom
Michael Doyle, McClatchy Newspapers
Wednesday, October 1, 2008

WASHINGTON - The next president will tip the courts, one way or another.

Supreme Court openings are all but guaranteed, and that’s just the start: 44 trial and appellate federal judicial vacancies already await filling. There will be more.

Consider this: President Bush has placed 316 judges on the bench during his two terms. One out of three federal judges now owes a lifetime-tenured job to the current president. Whoever replaces Bush will be likewise recasting courthouses, top to bottom.

“The proper role of the judiciary has become one of the defining issues of this presidential election,” Republican presidential candidate John McCain said in May. “It will fall to the next president to nominate hundreds - hundreds - of qualified men and women to the federal courts, and the choices we make will reach far, far into the future.”

In truth, many polls suggest, relatively few voters consider the federal
judiciary a defining issue. But those who do care, care a lot.

On Monday, timed to the opening of the Supreme Court’s new term, the
conservative Judicial Confirmation Network will begin running on ads Fox
News Channel attacking Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

“It’s kind of a sleeper issue in this election, with so much else going on,”
said Wendy Long, counsel for the Judicial Confirmation Network, but “our
internal polls show people do care about the issue.”

McCain used his May speech at Wake Forest University to drive home what his campaign terms his own “vision for the courts.” This includes homage to a “strict constructionist philosophy” and a commitment to appoint Supreme Court justices like John Roberts and Samuel Alito.

Obama, a former part-time University of Chicago law lecturer, takes a
different direction. While praising their legal qualifications, Obama voted
against both Roberts and Alito. In doing so, the Harvard Law School graduate shed light on his own judicial inclinations.

“Legal process alone will not lead you to a rule of decision,” Obama
declared during debate over the Roberts nomination. “In those difficult
cases, the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.”

Tellingly, Obama cited affirmative action, reproductive rights and the
rights of the disabled as among those legal questions requiring judges to
posses “empathy.” It is now commonly assumed in Washington legal circles that Obama is bound to appoint a woman and/or a person of color to high court if given a chance.

Either candidate is bound to put his standards into practice. By next
September, six of the nine Supreme Court justices will be at least 70 years old. Justice John Paul Stevens turns 89 in April.

“The Supreme Court is on the ballot this fall, and the stakes could not be higher for Americans,” said People for the American Way President Kathryn Kolbert in a statement released Wednesday.

In some ways, the advocacy groups are out ahead of the public at large.
The Supreme Court and the federal judiciary didn’t even crack the top 20 issues considered important to voters, a late-September ABC/Washington Post survey found.

A recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg survey asked voters why they had negative impressions of either McCain or Obama. Only 1 percent cited the courts. This was less than the number who claimed that Obama was “not Christian” or that McCain was “too old (or) could die in office.”

Moreover, no president can unilaterally impose judges. The Senate, too, has a say. Consequently, stark campaign declarations tend to soften amid the real-world confirmation requirements on Capitol Hill.

Every one of the 48 U.S. District Court judges confirmed during the current Congress has swept through the Senate by a unanimous or voice vote. Appellate vacancies tend to be more controversial. They shape lasting constitutional interpretations and they cover multiple states. Even so, eight of the 10 federal appellate judges confirmed during this Congress secured a unanimous or voice vote.

Obama is on the Senate Judiciary Committee and McCain isn’t. But when
controversy over judicial nominations threatened to cause a Capitol Hill
showdown, it was McCain who played the far more active peacekeeping role.

Frustrated over Democratic impediments to GOP judicial nominees, Senate Republicans in the spring of 2005 contemplated changing the rules to make it easier for the majority to end filibusters. McCain was part of a bipartisan “Gang of 14″ senators who opposed this so-called nuclear option, flying in the face of his party’s most adamant conservatives.

“I think it’s a very dangerous course to embark on,” McCain said at the
time.

McCain also had voted for both of President Clinton’s Supreme Court
nominees, Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

However, McCain is far more likely than Obama to flog the Supreme Court with immoderate rhetoric for decisions he doesn’t like.

McCain, in June, denounced the court for “an assault” on law enforcement after the justices struck down Louisiana’s law permitting execution of child rapists. He called “outrageous” a 2005 decision allowing governments to seize private property for economic development. He called a 2008 ruling extending constitutional habeas corpus rights to Guantanamo Bay detainees “one of the worst decisions in the history of this country.” ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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