Subscription Required
WallStreet Journal Online
7/26/6
Enter Michael Wallace. Anyone who still clings to the fiction that the ABA can be counted on to provide professional evaluations of judicial nominees without regard to politics should take a look at the current squabble over Mr. Wallace, whom Mr. Bush has nominated for the New Orleans-based Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. In May the ABA panel rated Mr. Wallace as “unanimously not qualified” for the federal bench.
Mr. Wallace is a highly regarded attorney in private practice in Mississippi, where his nomination has bipartisan support. He clerked for the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist and in the early 1980s served as counsel to then-Congressman Trent Lott. In 1999, Mr. Lott hired him back as special counsel during President Clinton’s impeachment trial.
That’s not a professional background likely to endear the nominee to liberals. But here’s the real disqualifier: During the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations, Mr. Wallace served on the board and then was chairman of the federally funded Legal Services Corporation, whose ostensible mission was to provide legal help for the poor but which was a haven for liberal legal activism.
Mr. Wallace’s efforts to reform the LSC had many critics, among them an attorney by the name of Michael Greco. Another opponent was the then-president of the New Hampshire bar, Stephen Tober, who accused him of having a “political agenda” at one particularly contentious hearing. Mr. Greco is now president of the ABA, and Mr. Tober is chairman of the ABA committee that nixed Mr. Wallace. Mr. Wallace’s reforms were adopted, and now it’s apparently payback time.
In any case, the ABA selection panel’s deliberations are secret and it hasn’t said why it considers Mr. Wallace unfit for the federal bench. In an exchange of letters last month with Mr. Tober, Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he would call the ABA to testify on its “Not Qualified” rating. He requested materials supporting the rating “as soon as possible.”
Mr. Tober replied that “we will do our best” to submit the materials 48 hours in advance of the hearing — a schedule that would make it difficult and perhaps impossible for Republicans on Judiciary to evaluate the ABA’s charges and prepare for the questioning. Senator Specter threatened a subpoena and the ABA supplied an advance copy of its testimony but not the supporting documents. The immediate effect of the ABA’s delaying tactics has been to push Mr. Wallace’s hearing date into September, when election-year politics make confirmation unlikely this year.
The ABA judicial screening panel has a long history of such ideological sandbagging, going back to its sabotage of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas. We’d have thought Republicans had learned their lesson. Given the political revenge that seems to be at work in the Wallace hit, it is past time to cut the ABA out of the vetting process altogether.
Magnolia Tribune
