2004 Presidential Transition
Here's a column written by John Aloysius Farrell in today's Denver Post about U.S. Senator Ken Salazar, his centrist and moderate credentials, and how things may play out with regard to federal judicial nominees [March 6, 2005, "Sound, fury await centrist Salazar"]. He writes, "In fact, the federal judiciary is largely a creature of the conservative wing of the Republican Party. A formidable majority (456) of the 835 federal judges were appointed by chief executives named Bush, Nixon, Ford or Reagan. Of those 835 judges, 0 were appointed by a president who wasn't Republican or hailed from outside the South, the nation's most conservative region. That's 0, as in zero, as in none. And though the federal judiciary is getting more diverse, 60 percent of those judges are white guys: not your most radical, underprivileged demographic group. Sure, there are a few liberal judges who hold extreme views, just as there is a conservative Supreme Court justice - Clarence Thomas - who believes in the unconventional notion that the Second Amendment means exactly what it says about the rights of Americans to bear arms. But by the time Bush leaves office, Republicans are likely to have appointed more than two-thirds of the federal bench. If anyone should be screaming about an unbalanced judiciary, it's the Democrats. For the right, it's not enough. The Senate approved 95 percent of Bush's first-term nominees to the federal bench, yet he and his party now want to steamroll Democratic opposition to the sliver of nominees who were rejected."
6:48:29 AM 
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