Word among some attendees at this past weekend’s American
Constitution Society for Law and Policy meeting in Washington, D.C.
was that Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the
Senate Judiciary Committee, had done the leftist organization and
its many lawyers and wanna-be legal scholars a huge favor.
“First, Specter refused to give [Supreme Court nominee Judge
John] Roberts a full
endorsement,” says a member of the ACS, which was started several
years ago as a liberal competitor to the more well-known and
established Federalist Society. “Then he presses the Administration
for documents on Roberts for us. He’s been a more than fair
chairman in a fight we aren’t expecting to win.”
There was also talk over the weekend of Roberts-related
information being passed to liberal legal interest groups from
“insiders” on the Judiciary committee. “We knew about the White
House wrangling with Specter over the start date of confirmation
hearings long before it got out publicly last week,” says the
lawyer.
Over the weekend it was learned that the White House had been
pushing for the confirmation process to start earlier than
September 6, the date hearings on Roberts will now begin.
Republican Judiciary staff don’t buy the notion that Democrats
are getting anything from inside the committee. But they and other
Republicans on the Hill remain concerned about the presence of
Hannibal G. Williams II Kemerer, who last winter
was hired by Specter to join the committee’s GOP staff to work on
judicial nominations.
When word leaked of the hiring, Kemerer was quickly reassigned,
but he remains on the committee staff. Before joining Judiciary, he
served as the NAACP’s assistant general counsel. Kemerer’s presence
on the committee is important because it appears that Democrats
intend to play the race card in the Roberts nomination fight.
Already, NAACP Legal Defense Fund director and legal counsel
Elaine Jones has begun strategizing with Hill
Democrats. Jones, who has worked with Kemerer, was the lawyer who
tried to change the outcome of a federal affirmative action case in
Michigan, by having Democrats in the Senate delay a federal
judicial nomination that might have changed the outcome of the case
that was playing out in the 6th Circuit.
Democratic staffers on Judiciary have spent the past two weeks
combing over any and all Roberts writings, and have hit on the
civil rights issue, in part because there is so little to point to.
“It’s hard to refute a negative,” says a Democratic Judiciary
staffer, “and we have the guys like Kennedy and Leahy who can pull
those kinds of charges off.”
Republicans staffers on the Judiciary Committee, however, insist
that while Democrats may want to play games with Roberts’
nomination, it won’t be because of Kemerer, who they say has
nothing to do with the Roberts nomination, and who has had no
access to any documents or inside information about the nomination
or the nomination process.
