Videos target 3 SCOTUS front-runners
Posted: Monday, May 18, 2009 4:03 PM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
Courts, Ads, Pete Williams
From NBC's Pete Williams
Saying it wants to be prepared when
President Obama announces a nominee, a conservative group has prepared short
internet-only ads, attacking three of the women most often mentioned as potential Supreme Court choices.
The Judicial Confirmation Network, which pushed strongly for the nominations of
John Roberts and
Samuel Alito during the
Bush administration, says
Elena Kagan,
Sonia Sotomayor, and
Diane Wood are not moderates or centrists. "They are hard-left activists who would decide cases based on their feelings and their personal political agendas," said Wendy Long, a former law clerk to Justice
Clarence Thomas.
The video on Elena Kagan criticizes her decision, as dean of Harvard's law school, to re-impose a ban on allowing military recruiters access to law school facilities. Kagan said Harvard's anti-discrimination policy required the action, because the military does not permit gay people to serve. The ad says she "kicked the military off campus, incredibly during a time of war."
The video on Wood criticizes her opinion that would have denied use of campus facilities by a Christian group that declined to allow gay students to join. And it says that her abortion protest ruling, which upheld the use of federal racketeering laws against anti-abortion demonstrators, was overturned by the Supreme Court.
And the video against Sonia Sotomayor takes her to task for rejecting a reverse discrimination lawsuit filed by New Haven firefighters. They sued after the city threw out the results of a written promotion test when the results showed that no African-American firefighters would have qualified for promotion.
"Every American understands the sacrifices firefighters make. But in Sotomayor's court, the content of your character is not as important as the color of your skin," the ad says.
