Mitt Romney embarrassed himself yet again regarding his record in Massachusetts in last night’s debate. Globe:
Asked during the debate why only one fourth of the judges he appointed were Republican, Romney cast the council as an obstruction to conservative agenda.
“They go before something known as the Governor’s Council,” Romney said. “It consists of, I believe, seven members [actually it’s eight, plus the Lt. Gov. -ed.], all of whom are elected Democrats. And so to be able to get my appointments through, I had to have people of both parties. And the people I put forward, all were individuals who I vetted very carefully to make sure they would follow the rule of law.” …
The body is often maligned and even mocked, more because of its members’ sometimes strange antics than any partisan agenda. The council is not known to vet judicial candidates based on party affiliation. At most, and especially more recently, members ask about political donations in hopes of preventing patronage. In addition, the council seldom rejected applicants during Romney’s tenure.
Of course, Romney’s claim is nonsense. I’m no great fan of the Governor’s Council, but the Globe is quite right to note that one thing they have generally not been is overtly partisan. The notion that the Governor’s Council would have started rejecting judicial nominees if there were too many Republicans among them, simply because they were Republicans, is more than a bit absurd. And Romney of course has no evidence to substantiate what he’s saying.
Closer to the mark are the comments, in the same article, of BMGer Dan Winslow, who spent two years running Romney’s judge-picking operation:
Romney’s first chief legal council, Daniel B. Winslow, who served from 2002 to 2004, established a non-partisan process for vetting judges through the Judicial Nominating Commission that was touted as a national model, because the primary application was judged blindly. That meant name, race, gender, and party affiliation, were not known during the initial review. Party affiliation was never a consideration, he said.
“People with political agendas really aren’t suitable for judgeships,” said Winslow, a former district court judge who is now a Republican legislator from Norfolk.
Winslow said that during the two years he served in the administration, the major reason Romney had few Republican appointments was a result of the talent pool.
“The fact is that there simply aren’t a lot of conservative lawyers in Massachusetts who were available for judgeships,” he said. “The pool of applicants was very low in many respects.”
Dan is trying to be kind to his former boss, but he undercuts Romney’s claim pretty severely in that passage. According to Winslow, the problem wasn’t the Governor’s Council. The problem was that most of the qualified applicants ended up not being Republicans.
Hilariously, though, apparently Romney had no trouble finding “conservative lawyers who were available for judgeships” once Winslow had moved on and Romney got rid of that pesky blind vetting process.
Near the end of Romney’s term, in 2006, he stripped the Judicial Nominating Commission of many of its powers, allowing his administration to put a more direct stamp on the judiciary, as he prepared to run for president.
What a sad joke this man is.
hesterprynne says
The Council was no political obstacle to Romney when he was Governor. Boston Globe, 7/25/05:
David says
nt
dont-get-cute says
He doesn’t just run his mouth speaking whatever happens to be true, that would “create tumult in the neighborhood” (in this case, Massachusetts politics). That’s the flip-flop side of what not being “a bomb thrower, rhetorically or literally,” means: he’s willing to present a false side to the public in order to advance his agenda and keep things flowing along as they were.
Peter Porcupine says
As Robert Downey’s Sherlock Holmes said to Jude Law’s Watson – ‘It’s so overt, it’s covert’
When Romney was Governor, the GC had been One Hundred Percent Democrats for over a generation. Precious few Republicans were appointed to the bench.