JCN Statement

Wendy Long, counsel, Judicial Confirmation Network: "As chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Specter deserves praise for recognizing the virtues of judicial restraint in voting to confirm Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito, as well as supporting appellate court nominees who practice judicial restraint. We hope he will continue to support judges in that mold."

When he ran for President, Obama said he'd set new and higher standards for bipartisanship in many things, including judicial nominations.

In defending the first Obama federal appellate court pick yesterday at the White House press briefing, spokesman Robert Gibbs cleared up any doubt as to whether the President was sticking with the lawless standard for evaluating judicial nominees that he articulated on the campaign trail (and that he invoked as a Senator to filibuster Justice Alito and vote against Chief Justice Roberts).

When he ran for President, Obama said he'd set new and higher standards for bipartisanship in many things, including judicial nominations.

Wendy E. Long, counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network, today issued the following statement on the 2001 WBEZ Chicago radio interview ( available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iivL4c_3pck and here http://www.drudgereport.com) in which Barack Obama said that one of the "failures of the civil rights movement" was that "the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society":

Wendy Long was a panelist at The Presidency and the Courts, a conference sponsored by The Cincinnati Lawyers Chapter of the Federalist Society and The Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs at Ashland University.

Wendy E. Long, counsel to Judicial Confirmation Network, made the following comment on the Palin-Biden Debate:

Last night, Joe Biden walked -- apparently voluntarily -- into a landmine. He said that "the ideology" and "the judicial philosophy" of a judge nominated by the President of the United States "makes a big difference." That he would confuse these two terms reveals that he and Barack Obama fail to understand that the role of a judge in our representative democracy is precisely not to impose his or her political ideology from the bench. Biden's comment confirms that Obama would nominate to the Court only hard-left, liberal activist judges -- not impartial judges who are faithful to the Constitution and who let the American people decide political policy issues for themselves.

St. Paul, Minnesota: Today, in advance of President Bush's address to the Republican National Convention, the Judicial Confirmation Network distributed buttons to delegates and guests bearing the photographs of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Sam Alito and stating "Thanks, W!"

"The idea is to thank President Bush for nominating two outstanding Justices of the Supreme Court who are faithful to the Constitution," said JCN Executive Director Gary Marx. "Besides keeping our country safe since 9/11, President Bush's Supreme Court picks will be the greatest legacy of his administration.

Just when you thought "white male in the South" didn't equal "presumptive racist," a disgusting spectacle with that familiar theme is unfolding in the United States Senate.

Call it "Nifong Justice" -- after the Durham, North Carolina district attorney who contrived to charge three white Duke lacrosse players with rape of a black woman, charging them with a "deep racial motivation." Nifong lost his prosecutor's job, was disbarred, and even went to jail for his racist character assassination of the lacrosse players.