Other Columns by Kay R. Daly
Kay R. Daly Bio

Printer-Friendly Version

Imagine you have a dream to become an attorney. You work impossibly long hours to achieve success in college and law school, reaching the top of your class. On the law review, you spend what little free time you have crafting articles on a variety of issues, not knowing that an obscure footnote could come back to haunt you twenty years later.

Saddled with student loan debt, you clerk for a judge for long hours and little pay. You work 80-hour work weeks in a variety of legal jobs until finally, you are at the top of your profession and regularly argue cases in the U.S. Supreme Court. Finally, at the peak of your career, the President of the United States bestows the ultimate honor upon your work by nominating you for a seat on the federal bench.

For the next several years of your life, you get the privilege of opening up the newspaper every morning only to read the latest lie written about you. The added bonus is that you are not allowed to respond in any way. The only time you can defend your record is if it happens to arise at your nomination hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee.

If and when you finally get a hearing, the grandstanding starts almost right away. For several hours, you and your family will have the privilege of hearing long-winded Senators list your sins against humanity. Strangely, the charges asserted and the language used to describe them sound almost identical to the lengthy missives launched by an alphabet soup of leftist organizations and echoed by their cohorts in the press.

Your answers at the hearing are met with sneering skepticism, scattered snickering throughout the hearing room by those leftist organizations and their multitude of minions and snide questions that question your judgment, your character, your religious beliefs, your affiliations, your writings, client list and anything else that strikes their fancy. No matter what answer you give, it won't satisfy either the liberal groups or their compatriots on the Judiciary Committee.

Although you have filled out dozens of pages of forms and questionnaires and subjected your life and everyone in it to the FBI, the Justice Department, the White House, the Senate Judiciary Committee and everyone in between, you will still leave the hearing room with yet more questions from Senators and their friends in the liberal organizations determined to sink your nomination.

The ugly truth of the matter is that once you are targeted either because your extraordinary resume and legal talents could put you on a short list for a U.S. Supreme Court nomination or simply because the leftists believe they can score cheap political points off of making you an example, you have earned a one-way ticket to a filibuster.

With slight adjustments, this story has been the same for every obstructed nominee. It is a sad state of affairs that these extraordinary lawyers and judges who have been nominated and filibustered will more likely be known for being filibustered than their extraordinary careers. The question becomes, who would want to subject a reputation for decades of hard work and accomplishment to this kind of abuse and destruction?

>> Continued -- Page 1 2