My colleague Carrie Severino has diligently pointed out that Chris Christie’s record on judicial nominations is, in a word, awful. Others have taken notice.
As Ann Corkery explained yesterday in a RealClearPolitics op-ed, Christie’s “soothing words” “cannot cover up his sorry record on Supreme Court nominees in New Jersey” or his recent lies about whether he supported the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court:
He certainly said the right things when he ran for office, promising to transform New Jersey’s hyper-activist Supreme Court with nominees who interpret rather than make the law. His record actually said something much different. Christie had said that conservative Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito would be his model for the type of jurist he’d choose. One of his picks for the state Supreme Court was a business lawyer without courtroom experience who has no discernable judicial philosophy and who favors gay marriage.
Christie also re-nominated the liberal Democrat who serves as chief justice of an activist court that a Manhattan Institute study showed was partially responsible for New Jersey’s high taxes because of mandates it has imposed in education and public housing. The report’s name: “The Court That Broke Jersey.”
And the New Jersey Star Ledger’s Paul Mulshine pointed out that Christie’s denials about supporting the Sotomayor confirmation are part of a larger pattern of inexplicable behavior by Christie.