I'm Pete du Pont with the National Center for Policy Analysis. Lost amid the news of captured pilots, tax cuts and the start of baseball season, you may have missed the note about the Bush Administration and the ABA. I didn't, and it made my day.
For decades, the American Bar Association got a first look at potential nominees for the federal bench, then voted on each person's worthiness.
But the ABA has a long history of liberal — even leftist – activism. It's been a virtual subset of the Democratic Party, contributing time and money to liberal causes and benefiting accordingly (trial lawyers, you'll recall, were one of Bill Clinton's favorite groups). So the administration dropped the ABA from the early review process.
The ABA, cried politics, to which any intelligent observer might respond, "Well, of course it was" — in this case, the politics of self-interest, and of getting rid of a nettlesome review process by a badly biased group.
Those are my ideas, and at the NCPA we know ideas can change the world. I'm Pete du Pont. Next time, SUVs save.