The Senate Democrats' idea of mainstream
Ed Whelan, at NRO's Bench Memos, demonstrates why Senators Leahy and company do not deserve to be taken seriously as arbiters of which judicial nominees are within the "mainstream." In 1994, they led the charge to have self-described "flaming liberal" H. Lee Sarokin confirmed to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. As a district judge Sarokin had, among other strange leftist rulings, held that the Morristown public library couldn’t enforce its written policies to expel a homeless man who regularly engaged in offensive and disruptive behavior and whose odor was so offensive that it prevented the library patrons from using certain areas of the library and prohibited library employees from performing their jobs. “[O]ne person’s hay-fever is another person’s ambrosia” was among Sarokin’s justifications for preventing a community from setting even minimal standards.
Senator Leahy praised Sarokin as “a judge of proven competence, temperament, and fairness” and “an excellent choice.” By contrast, the Third Circuit, to which Sarokin was nominated, had lambasted Sarokin for “judicial usurpation of power,” for ignoring “fundamental concepts of due process,” for destroying the appearance of judicial impartiality, and for “superimpos[ing his] own view of what the law should be in the face of the Supreme Court’s contrary precedent.”
Sarokin got his up-or-down vote and was confirmed.
