FOD 2011.11.28

In his never-ending quest to drag down America to the level of the rest of the world - no American exceptionalism allowed here - obama has nominated a slew of unqualified candidates to fill federal judge positions. Who says they're unqualified? The American Bar Association.

The American Bar Association (ABA) has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees “not qualified,” slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships...

Newsworthy, perhaps, but not especially shocking - or so it seems. But here comes the kicker.

... and nearly all of the prospects given poor ratings were women or members of a minority group...

Affirmative action run amuck. Equal opportunity is not - or at least should not be - the same as equal outcome.

The number of Obama prospects deemed “not qualified” already exceeds the total number opposed by the group during the eight-year administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; the rejection rate is more than three and a half times as high as it was under either of the previous two presidencies, documents and interviews show. 

No further comment necessary.

Administration officials are perplexed about the reasons for some of the low ratings, and in discussions with bar panel leaders, they have expressed growing frustrations, people familiar with those conversations said. In particular, they have questioned whether the panelists — many of whom are litigators — place too much value on courtroom experience at the expense of lawyers who pursued career paths less likely to involve trials, like government lawyers and law professors.

These are supposed to be judges, you idiots. They need trial experience to run a courtroom. Let's not populate the judiciary with people having no real world experience - people who are law professors, or who have worked as community organizers. We all know how well that's worked out for us with obama.

Mr. Obama has made it a policy goal to diversify the bench in terms of race, gender and life experiences.

How about making it a policy goal to nominate the most qualified, regardless of race, gender and life experiences?

In a side note, Harry Reid criticized the ABA for its "tepid" rating of a district court nominee from his state, Gloria Navarro.

Ms. Navarro, a former public defender and government lawyer, had been endorsed by both Mr. Reid and the state’s Republican senator, John Ensign. But the bar group rated her as merely “qualified” — and a minority of the vetting panel had voted to rate her “not qualified.”

Mr. Reid, who said he thought the association had delivered its tepid rating because she had no prior judicial experience, sharply rejected the notion that Ms. Navarro was not well qualified, saying he was upset that Ms. Navarro “is not rated as high as she should be” and arguing that she “has had experience in the real world of government, the real world of law.”

Hey Harry, I hate to break this to you, but government and the law are not the real world.

And that's a big part of what's wrong with the real world. People like Harry, who live in the fantasy world of government and the law, a world where there is little accountability for their actions (or inactions), a world where 'solutions' to problems simply involve kicking them down the road to future generations, are the ones who are responsible for governing the real world.

How did we let ourselves get into this mess?

P.S. Note that the source for this post is the N.Y. Times.

I'm as surprised as you are...