November 21, 2009:
Hamilton was confirmed Friday. Here is the roll call vote.
With less than 60 votes, the Senate could have defeated the nomination had lawmakers voted Tuesday to sustain the filibuster pro-life advocates launched against Hamilton.
The vote saw all but one Republican, Indiana Sen. Dick Lugar, who is nominally pro-life, vote against Hamilton while all Democrats supported his nomination except two who were not present for the vote.
However, the cloture vote saw no Democrats joining the 29 pro-life Republicans who supported it and a defection of some of the more liberal Republicans in the caucus.
Americans United for Life president Charmaine Yoest said Hamilton should have been defeated because “judges should uphold Constitutional restrictions on abortion.”
“As a District Court judge, Hamilton promoted his radical pro-abortion agenda. His promotion to the Seventh Circuit” is a “serious concern to the pro-life community,” she told LifeNews.com.
Hamilton was tapped by Obama in March to fill a vacancy on the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
As he promised he would do, pro-life Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama led the filibuster and said Hamilton should be opposed in part because of his pro-abortion views.
Sessions noted how Hamilton kept an informed consent measure from being enforced in Indiana, thereby prohibiting women from getting information about abortion’s risks and alternatives so they can find positive alternatives.
“And for seven years, through a series of rulings, Hamilton kept it form being enforced. This case is a blatant example of allowing personal views to frustrate the will of the people and the popularly elected representatives of the government of Indiana,” Sessions said. “This appeared to me to be obstructionism.”
Senate votes to end filibuster on nominee David Hamilton…
November 17th, 2009:
The Senate has just voted to end the filibuster championed by Senator Sessions by a vote of 70-29 clearing the way for his confirmation. 10 Republicans voted with the Democrats to end debate and move to a vote on the activist judge.
Democrats, with a bit of Republican help, voted 70-29 to limit debate on U.S. District Judge David Hamilton, exceeding the 60 votes needed and assuring his confirmation to the Chicago-based appeals court by a simple majority of the 100-member Senate.
At least 10 Republicans broke from the filibuster.
The vote fired a political shot over the GOP’s bow: You don’t have the votes to prevent Obama from remaking a federal judiciary that for the past eight years was filled with conservative judges chosen by George W. Bush.
Republicans have objected to holding a vote on Hamilton’s confirmation since June, when the Judiciary Committee reported his nomination favorably to the full Senate.
Conservative Republican senators and their judicial-watching outside groups then launched a major political assault on Hamilton.
They criticized his rulings against Christian prayers in the Indiana legislature and against a menorah in the Indiana Municipal Building’s holiday display.
Conservatives were furious that Hamilton struck down part of an Indiana law requiring women to make two trips to a clinic before they could get an abortion. He said the requirement placed an undue burden on a woman’s constitutional right to choose to end a pregnancy.
Beyond the political message, the filibuster effectively ended a bipartisan accord reached in 2005, when 14 senators signed onto a deal that effectively stopped Democratic filibusters of Bush’s judicial nominees except in extraordinary circumstances.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., who led the opposition to Hamilton, argued that Hamilton’s record met his definition of extraordinary circumstances.
Hamilton’s confirmation by itself will not have a large political effect. The 7th Circuit appellate court, which serves, Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, has seven judges nominated by Republican presidents — while Hamilton would be the fourth chosen by a Democrat.
Last week, the Senate confirmed U.S. District Judge Andre Davis of Baltimore for the appeals court based in Richmond, Va., giving Democratic nominees a 6-5 edge on the 4th Circuit that once was a conservative legal bastion.
Other appellate courts are close to a political turnaround.
–The New York-based 2nd Circuit, with 13 seats, currently has five Republican-nominated judges, four Democrats and four vacancies. One nominee for a vacancy is pending.
–The 3rd Circuit, centered in Philadelphia, has 14 seats and is evenly divided politically, six and six. Obama nominees in the pipeline would fill the two open seats.
–The Boston-based 1st Circuit has six seats, with three Republican and two Democratic-nominated judges. Obama has made a nomination for the vacancy.
November 9th, 2009:
I told you two weeks ago, about Edward Chen, a liberal activist judge awaiting Senate confirmation for an appointment to the Federal Bench. Here is another Lefty radical that is heading toward Senate confirmation that Senator Harry Reid is reportedly supporting wholeheartedly. The Honorable David Hamilton is his name, and President Obama has nominated him to fill a vacant seat on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in his home city of Chicago. Hamilton has been “redflagged” by Senate Republicans as an activist for a series of cases he ruled upon at the District Court level where he has helped to eradicate prayer from the Indiana State Assembly and overturned abortion statutes drafted by the state.
Here is part of a story posted last week on FoxNews.com
Obama chose Hamilton, a U.S. district judge in Indiana, as his first judicial nomination in March. The White House has characterized Hamilton as a moderate pick whose judicial record would temper criticism from conservative and liberal extremists — bringing an end to the political confirmation wars that have long accompanied such judicial nominations.
In a letter penned Nov. 3 to his GOP colleagues, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama blasted Hamilton for using his position to “drive a political agenda.” Hamilton stated in a 2003 speech that the role of a judge includes “writing footnotes to the Constitution” and believes “empathy” should influence a judge’s decision making, Sessions wrote.
Not so, say Hamilton’s supporters, including prominent conservative lawyer Geoffrey Slaughter, a partner at Taft Stettinius and Hollister LLP in Indianapolis, and Republican Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana.
“I have a lot of respect for him as a judge,” Slaughter said in an interview with FoxNews.com. “He’s a tough questioner — an inquisitor of all sides. And he’s a gentleman of the highest character.”
From 1989 to 1991, Hamilton, a graduate of Yale Law School, served as counsel to then-Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh. Hamilton, the nephew of former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton, was named to the bench by President Bill Clinton in 1994.
Since that time, Hamilton has received attention for a handful of controversial rulings in the state, including a 2005 decision to prohibit the Indiana state Legislature from beginning its sessions with Christian prayers. The ruling was later dismissed by a panel of the 7th Circuit after an appeal, which found that the individuals named in the suit had no case because they were not harmed by the prayers.
In 2008, Hamilton ruled to strike down a law requiring sex offenders to release detailed, personal information, including e-mail addresses and Internet screen names, and to submit to routine search warrants.
The district judge, who deemed the law unconstitutional, wrote at the time, “The prospect of searches ‘at any time’ without a search warrant, without probable cause and without even reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing, would dramatically impair the privacy these plaintiffs have the right to enjoy in their own homes under the Fourth Amendment.”
Hamilton also ruled in 2003 to strike down part of an Indiana law compelling abortion clinics to provide women with information about alternatives to abortion — a decision that was later overturned.
“His judicial philosophy is to the left of mine, there’s no doubt about that, but his decisions are not so far outside of the mainstream as to be disqualified,” said Slaughter, who appeared before Hamilton as a litigant in a 1995 case in which Slaughter was defending the state’s abortion statutes.
“In my own view, frankly, I think he got it wrong,” Slaughter said of the 1995 case, in which Hamilton ruled to block the enforcement of a state informed consent law. “He’s left of center — though within the 30-yard lines.”
In defense of his 2003 remarks on “footnotes” to the U.S. constitution, Hamilton told the Senate Judiciary Committee in April that “the concept of the footnote implies what we’re trying to do is not something new, but work out the details of how those principles [in the Constitution] apply to new situations.” He cited the racial desegregation of schools in the 1960s to drive home his point.
But Sessions and other Republicans say Hamilton is nothing less than a liberal jurist whose rulings in at least six cases demonstrate that his “activism has not been restricted to his speeches.”
“This is not the type of service that should be rewarded with a promotion. This is one of those extraordinary circumstances where the president should be informed that his nominee is not qualified,” Sessions wrote in his letter.
