Richard Griffin is a fairly standard conservative idealogue, but not crazy like Owen. Furthermore, he's a lackluster thinker, so he's unlikely to write much that would become important precedent. But Griffin is a symbolic figure in the broader fight on the filibuster, because in 1968 his father, Republican Senator Robert Griffin of Michigan, used the filibuster to scuttle Lyndon Johnson's nomination of Justice Abe Fortas to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court [...]One mistake the writer makes that most people make, the title is not Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. The title is Chief Justice of the United States.
Griffin's reasons for opposing Fortas weren't all that principled; at heart, he and the Senators who supported his filibuster--mostly Republicans, with a smattering of conservative Southern Democrats--opposed Fortas because he was too liberal, and because they figured (correctly) that they could bottle things up long enough that the appointment wouldn't need to be filled until after Johnson's term ended. Fortas remained an associate justice for a while, and Richard Nixon nominated Warren Burger to replace Earl Warren as Chief Justice. But his statements, as cited by Ornstein, make it clear that Robert Griffin strongly supported the filibuster. How appropriate that the Republicans like C. Boyden Gray are now forced to twist the historical record to try to convince people that the last Senator to lead a filibuster really didn't filibuster Abe Fortas, and how appropriate that Robert Griffin's own words and actions are now being used to justify denying a lifetime judicial appointment to his own son.
Learn it - live it.
No comments:
Post a Comment