We all have blind spots; some of ours are greater than others. If you happen to be someone in the public eye, it’s more likely that other people will happen to see yours.

Each of us needs one or several people who can help us identify our blind spots and warn us when they seem to be leading us into a danger zone.

There may be no one in the world of politics who consistently gets duped more often than Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins. She seems to be about as well-intentioned as any Republican can be. She hopes for the best, so much so, that there are many times when she thinks that the better angels will visit upon the shoulders of someone who clearly has no intention of taking a compassionate or reasonable path. While often being naïve in judging the intentions of judicial nominees, she can be a savvy politician when dealing with the likes of Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia on possible bi-partisan agreements (this plays into his blind spot on bi-partisanship). She also knows well the playing field of her home state of Maine and consistently wins reelection by substantial margins in a fairly progressive state.

But nowhere has her blind spot been more apparent than in her assessment of Supreme Court nominees. A backdrop to this is that Collins is clearly pro-choice on the abortion issue, and she has wanted Supreme Court nominees to be committed to preserving the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling.

She was completely duped by Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Collins is quoted in Rolling Stone as saying the following about the leak of the Roberts Courts decision in the Dobbs case that overturned Roe, “If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office.” Perhaps it would be, but clearly the two of them would not be the first individuals to walk into the office of a senator and fudge the truth. Like most others who come to visit Collins and other legislators, visitors generally say what they think will give them the greatest advantage.

Gorsuch told Collins that Roe was “the law of the land.”  Regarding Kavanaugh, Collins asserted that he “said under oath many times, as well as to me personally many times, that he considers Roe to be ‘precedent upon precedent’ because it had been reaffirmed in the Casey v. Planned Parenthood case.”

According to Rolling Stone magazine, “Collins expressed shock and deep concern when a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Services decision indicated the justice would likely vote to overturn Roe was leaked to the public.” She felt that Gorsuch and Kavanaugh had misled her.

One of the most important assets that a politician can have is a strong BS detector. Not telling the truth, embellishing the truth, misleading others are all essentially components of the currency of politics. Why should nominees for the Supreme Court be any different? They want to both advance their own careers as well as the beliefs they have on issues that are likely to come before the Court.

This summer our non-profit worked with an outstanding group of high school interns. One of them, Corvin Haake, suggested that a president withdraw a judicial nominee if that nominee refuses to directly and honestly answer questions when testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Clearly, a nominee must be told in advance by the president that they must answer questions directly or their nomination will be yanked. It would thoroughly change the way in which Supreme Court justices are selected and could be a major first step in elevating the level of honesty in politics.

Maybe Susan Collins could lead the movement, by acknowledging that she has a blind spot when it comes to assessing nominees. She needs ones who would be honest, and so do the American people. She can make lemonade out of a personal lemon she has.

The nomination process is a bullshit-a-rama. We need to find a way to changed it. Senator Collins, please lead the charge!

The post Rescuing Susan Collins – Make Judicial Nominees Speak the Truth appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We’ve all heard that it’s better to deal with the devil you know rather than the one you don’t. In the United States, we have a system in which the nine individuals set policy for one of the three branches of government and they don’t have to tell us a damn thing about themselves when applying for the job.

Imagine any other job interview in which you didn’t have to answer the questions thrown your way. What if you could respond to a possible employer with words to the effect of “I don’t want to answer your hypothetical question about what I would do in that situation because I might actually be called upon to answer it when I’m on the job.”

This is the way that the Senate Judiciary Committee has operated with Judge Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump’s first nominee for the United States Supreme Court. But this is not a Trumpian – Republican-controlled Senate problem. This is a structural and procedural issue in governance that has existed through most of our history.

The mythology of our judicial system is that the bench is populated with judges who bring no pre-conceived notions to their jobs. Year after year, generation after generation, members of the elite Senate Judiciary Committee has continued to perpetuate this myth.

It’s a charade. Senators may ask Supreme Court nominees what their views are on Roe v Wade, or on affirmative action, or executive privilege, or virtually anything else of importance that might come before the Court. But the history of responses, and now the expectations of responses, is that the nominees are going to stonewall the questions. We learn nothing.

CNN reports:

Gorsuch declined to explain his legal views or offer an assessment of past Supreme Court cases. He said he decides disputes based only on the facts and the law. “There’s no such thing as a Republican judge or a Democratic judge,” he asserted. “We just have judges in this country.”

Gorsuch’s assertion that there are no Republican or Democratic judges is laughable when we look at perhaps the most important decision of modern times, Bush v Gore. It was a straight party-line vote, with Bush getting the votes of all five justices appointed by Republican presidents and Gore getting the votes from the four justices appointed by Democrats.

The Members of the Supreme Court tell us how it’s all about the law, not about the people who appear before the court. How can you possibly separate the two, especially when so many laws are poorly crafted, nefariously intended, and the brainchilds of legislators who shame the idea of the democracy that our founding fathers created?

Let’s be for real. The situations that come before the Supreme Court are tricky and they deserve the best kind of deliberation possible. Yes, the justices must take into consideration the laws and historical precedent, but equally important are the particular people involved in the case, and what the expected outcomes of their decision would be in contemporary society. The Justices need to apply a balance of reason and empathy to every case before them.

This is why Supreme Court nominees must not be approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee when they don’t answer questions such as what their views are on abortion, euthanasia, affirmative action, the powers of the presidency, and more. Since the justices are nominated by partisan presidents, we should come to expect that the nominees will hold partisan views. That’s okay. What’s not okay is for us to not know how far to the left or right their views happen to be.

Neil Gorsuch might be the best we can get from Donald Trump. But senators are being asked to vote for him largely sight unseen. Democrats don’t have to oppose him because of the injustice done to Merrick Garland or because we’re about to learn more regarding Trump and Russia. Democrats have the opportunity to set a new standard for approval, one that will apply to their nominees as well. What better time than now to cut the BS and allow Senators and the American people alike to be informed voters. Make Gorsuch sit until he answers the questions.

The post Approve Gorsuch – contingent on him answering the questions appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Suppose that you were judging a bake-off among contestants who didn’t know the difference between sugar and salt. Suppose that you were a judge on a show like “The Voice” and the contestants did not know if they were on or off key.

Now suppose that you are a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and you are rendering decisions about laws made by legislators who are bought and paid for, and often times, are not the brightest bulbs on the tree.

Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s nominee to fill the seat that has been vacant “without cause” for nearly a year, has repeated the so-called pious truth that “we are a nation of laws, not men” (and women to those who want to be fair and accurate about it). Conventional wisdom says that the law is held in such high esteem that it can only be adjudicated in marble buildings with high ceilings where whispering is often a crime.

The men and women on the U.S. Supreme Court sit to render profound judgment regarding the constitutionality and propriety of …. what. Well, they assess the judgment of those who fashion our laws at the federal, state and municipal levels.

The separation of powers, the idea of a branch which interprets the laws the legislative bodies pass and executive branches ratify and enforce, makes enormous sense. It is a cornerstone of our constitution and one of the ideas (unlike the acceptance of slavery) that survives the test of time. And perhaps as the founders envisioned American government, it would be populated by the “best and the brightest” among us.

If that was ever true, it certainly is not so now. In a recent Gallop Poll, the American people gave Members of Congress an 8% positive rating, slightly above that of lobbyists. And by the way, judges weighed in at only 45%.

It was only forty years ago when a United States Senator ran for re-election and accepted no campaign contributions. Wisconsin’s William Proxmire spent $200 out of his own pocket to win in 1976 and again in 1982. In the 2016 race for the Senate seat in Wisconsin, the total amount spent by the Democratic candidate was $24,336,176. And that candidate (who lost), was Russ Feingold, one of the authors of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act regulated the financing of political campaigns. Where are the days of the $200 Senate campaigns and the candidates who could win public favor without money?

So to say that members of the U.S. Senate spend more time raising and spending money now and less time crafting the laws that judges will eventually adjudicate is an understatement. Races for the U.S. House of Representatives now cost on average well over a million dollars. At the state level, the money is harder to track but it is splurging. It takes a very special kind of person who will run for state office by openly raising money from voters rather than interests, and who will focus on meaningful rather than symbolic legislation.

If Judge Gorsuch is confirmed to the Supreme Court, he will continue the recent tradition of all justices having gone to law school at either Harvard or Yale Universities. Obviously, these justices have had the finest of training. But for what? To wrestle with the same philosophical issues that our founders did?

Not exactly. Instead they need to clean up the messes of state legislatures that spend their time deciding which students can go to which bathrooms. Or the legislatures that say that a permit to own a gun is an acceptable form of identification to vote but an ID from a university is not.

It is true that many of our legislative bodies do need adult supervision and those adults need to be wise, compassionate and responsible. But the key to being a responsible adult does not lie in statute. Adulthood may involve understanding and enforcing rules, but those who supervise others know best how to apply given rules to different situations involving different people. A Harvard or Yale law degree is not always necessary for that.

So as we consider whether or not Neil Gorsuch is the best person to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, let’s remember how his nomination is the result of malfeasance on the part of members of the U.S. Senate who would not consider President Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland with over 300 days left in his term. Let’s also remember that many of the laws that the justices will be interpreting will be ones that were crafted with the same degree of fairness and adult behavior as those same Senators exercised in filling this vacancy.

The post Inflating the jobs of Supreme Court justices appeared first on Occasional Planet.