Enforcement through reliable ideologues

About a week ago I wrote about the GOP's quiet refusal to confirm judges to federal courts (even though Obama has been making them as uncontroversial as possible). Obama appears ready to confront the issue by nominating three candidates for the DC Circuit Court. This is the court that handles disputes between the prez. and Congress and is the court that handles disputes with gov't agencies like the National Labor Relations Board and the Environmental Protection Agency (gee, wonder why there would be disputes over those agencies?).

Essayist Terrence Heath reviews the issue. He starts with the current understaffing of federal courts and why it is the GOP's fault (mentioned in my previous post). Heath goes on to explain how we got here. Back in the 1980s with the Powel Memorandum being followed by conservatives ready with funding, Reagan, by way of Atty. General Ed Meese, aggressively filled the Dept. of Justice with reliable conservatives. Since then they have become reliable conservative judges and justices, Roberts and Alito among them. Meese also identified candidates such as Scalia and Kennedy.

The most direct way to change the law was to appoint reliable ideologues to enforce it.

The success rate of the National Chamber Litigation Center has shown how effective this conservative effort to stack the courts has been. Heath lists some of their important cases, all of them good for corporations, not country.

In spite of the GOP cries, Obama is not stacking the DC Circuit Court. He is trying to un-stack it. And the GOP, with their efforts to eliminate the seats (rather than let Obama fill them) are trying to preserve their stacking efforts. Over the summer Obama could press the case and back the GOP into a corner. This is a situation in which the GOP does not want a lot of news stories.