Quote:
Originally posted by Liquor Dealer
Congress prevents new apointees from even receiving a hearing if they are deemed out of step with Democratic Party ideals. I'll shut up - your turn.
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To be fair, the shoe was on the other foot in the Clinton years. I think I remember hearing that this congress actually had a better confirmation record in the first two years of Bush's term than the previous Republican congress had during Clinton's first 2 (of his 2nd term, I think).
Regardless, this only highlights your point: the whole process has become horribly politicized. However, I'm sure there are a lot of qualified candidates for judicial positions and if simple qualification were the only criteria being used to appoint nominees, each president could stack the judicial ranks with extremists of his or her own political/ideological bent. Even with alternating parties in power, you'd just end up with liberal extremists and conservative extremists, which would be balanced on the whole but extremely unbalanced on a local level.
The way things are now the relative balance of power in congress prevents anybody but fairly moderate nominees from being appointed, which IMHO leads to a much better, more objective judicial system. There's plenty of room for interpretation of legal issues and I'd rather have people who are politically moderate interpreting the law than a bunch of liberal wingnuts on one side and a bunch of conservative or fundamentalist wingnuts on the other side.