Making sure their noxious ideology lives long after they’re gone
by digby
It’s football time again — and I’m not talking Super Bowl:
In 2009, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) wrote a letter to President Obama recommending that he nominate Jennifer May-Parker, a federal prosecutor from his state, to a judicial vacancy on a federal trial court. You can read his letter to President Obama here. Last June, the president agreed with Burr’s recommendation, and nominated Ms. May-Parker to be a federal district judge.
And now Burr is blocking May-Parker’s nomination, invoking an arcane Senate tradition that allows senators to unilaterally veto judicial nominees from their own state. In an interview with the Huffington Post’s Jennifer Bendery, Burr refused to explain why the woman he once said has “the requisite qualifications to serve with distinction” as a federal district judge is suddenly unfit to be a federal district judge.
Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that it’s time to lose this little bit archaic tradition right along with the filibuster for judicial nominees. There’s a reason why the right wingers are so frantic about who gets on the courts. Everyone else should be just as frantic or the legacy of this era of conservative lunacy will last a whole lot longer than it has any right to.
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