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Monday, January 06, 2003
God save us -- from Washingtonian Magazine:
Will Hatch Seek Opening for Himself on Supreme Court?
When President George W. Bush sends his first Supreme Court nomination to the Senate, Judiciary Committee chair Orrin Hatch is expected to shepherd it through.
But, as they say, not so fast.
Hatch has been spreading the word, through his old friend Attorney General John Ashcroft and others, that perhaps it’s time his name should be sent to the Senate.
Hatch hassurfaced in the past as a potential Supreme Court nominee. If anything works against him now, it will be his age—68. That reality seems to have sent the hale and hearty Hatch into a now-or-never mentality.
His renewed interest in the court has confounded judge pickers at the White House. They worry that if they choose someone else, the powerful chairman might not be helpful.
The most likely nomineesinclude Virginia federal appeals-court judges J. Harvie Wilkinson and Michael Luttig; Solicitor General Theodore Olson; former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr; and White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez.
If Chief Justice William Rehnquist is the first to retire, who will move up to his spot? It now looks like Clarence Thomas, and not Antonin Scalia, would replace Rehnquist. The juxtaposition of Thomas’s breaking his usual silence to deliver an impassioned lecture against cross-burning and Senator Trent Lott’s remarks on the virtues of the 1948 segregationist Dixiecrats was not lost on President Bush. He now believes that elevating Thomas would be the most dramatic way to return his party to being the party of Lincoln and not the party of Lott.
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