Specter Watching: Making History in the Judiciary Committee

Supreme Court justices are some of the most powerful people in the United States. They make decisions that influence every aspect of American life, from education to health care to marriage and children.

And the judicial branch of the United States government is made up of just nine people. When you think about it, that’s a whole lot of power in very few hands.

That’s why our government’s system of checks and balances is so genius. The president nominates the Supreme Court justices and the Senate has the power to confirm or reject them.

Republican Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania is head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which conducts the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominees. The hearing usually affects the way Senators vote on the nominee, so the Senate Judiciary Chair is vital to the check and balance over the Supreme Court.

New nominee up for confirmation

The Senate Judiciary Committee will begin its confirmation hearing of President Bush’s latest Supreme Court nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor, Samuel A. Alito Jr., on January 9, 2005.

Senator Specter will preside over the proceedings, adding to his extensive experience with the nomination process.

About Specter

Senator Specter is often called the best constitutional scholar in the Senate. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania, as well as from Yale Law School, passing the Pennsylvania Bar in 1956.

He became a prominent lawyer in Philadelphia and was active in politics, beginning his political life as a Democrat. He worked with the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of JFK and has publicly and famously disagreed with that commission’s report.

He eventually became a Republican and scored an upset by winning a race for District Attorney in heavily Democratic Philadelphia.

Specter is a moderate Republican, which is not all that surprising since he was once a Democrat. He is moderate on issues like abortion and gay rights, but strongly supports the death penalty and the right to bear arms, voting against the Brady Bill, background checks at gun shows, the ban on assault weapons, and trigger locks for handguns. He supports affirmative action and voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1990. In recent years he has been less enthusiastic about lawsuit reform than many members of his party. In 1995, he was the only Republican to vote to limit tax cuts to individuals with incomes of less than one million dollars. Specter also supports an increase in the federal minimum wage. These stances helped him to win the election in three cycles (1986, 1992 and 1998).

His opposition to Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is seen as one of the final nails in Bork's coffin. However, he raised the ire of many Democrats who had supported him for years with his aggressive and some say sexist questioning of Anita Hill during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

In 1998 and 1999, Specter criticized his own party for its impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Specter famously cited Scottish law to render a verdict of "not proven" on President Clinton's impeachment. However, his verdict was recorded as "not guilty" in the Senate records.

In 2005, when Specter was in line for chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee under the seniority system, conservatives began a campaign to thwart him because of his comments on Roe v. Wade and judicial nominees. Specter then met with many conservative Republican Senators, and based on assurances he gave them, he was recommended for the Judiciary Committee's chairmanship in late 2004. He officially assumed that position when the 109th Congress convened on January 4, 2005.

In February 2005, Specter announced that he had been diagnosed with an advanced form of Hodgkin’s disease, a type of cancer. Nevertheless, Specter worked during chemotherapy. He ended treatment in July and has returned to full activity, chairing the hearings on John Roberts’ confirmation as Chief Justice.

Specter and abortion

Arlen Specter is a pro-choice Republican, but has said that he does not confirm or deny judicial nominees based on the abortion question. That statement clashes with his New York Times editorial on the Roberts nomination where he said, "In this battle, the central issue remains Roe v. Wade."

In that same editorial, Specter also pointed out that "confirmation precedents forcefully support the propriety of a nominee declining to spell out how he or she would vote on a specific case. Abraham Lincoln is reputed to have said pretty much the same thing: ‘We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should and he should answer us, we would despise him. Therefore, we must take a man whose opinions are known.’"

Both Specter and Lincoln make a good case for protecting nominees from answering direct questions about how they would rule in a certain case. But since it‘s not a law, but rather precedent or tradition that reinforces the rule, it is worth asking, have times changed enough to where judicial nominees need to answer directly about their published views and beliefs and is that different from telling us how they would rule in hypothetical cases that may come up before the Supreme Court?

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Posted on: 1/8/2006