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More Parsky Watch Parsky Watch - The Magazine Take the Parsky Watch IQ Test Visit the Parsky Watch Store	Back to News archives California Judge - Picking Panels Under Fire News #4 June 1st, 2002 GOP Chairman Charges Process Is Producing David Souters By John Gizzi Los Angeles investment banker and Bushman Gerald Parsky, the de facto leader of the California Republican Party, is once again taking fire from the state’s conservatives, this time because of the bipartisan panels he created for recommending to the White House candidates for federal judgeships in California. In keeping with the so-called Parsky Plan that engendered these panels, Republicans have relinquished equal power in the recommendation process to the state’s two liberal Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. "Under this mechanism, we’ve had 13 nominees for the bench come out of the Los Angeles area alone and I’m worried that a new generation of David Souters has been created," California GOP State Chairman Shawn Steel told Human Events during a recent trip to Washington. Steel called for scrapping the year-old procedure in which, he said, "Boxer and Feinstein pre-select and veto federal judges for a Republican White House." Instead, he proposes that the administration should turn over the recommendation process to the 21 Republicans in California’s U.S. House delegation and risk whatever retribution that draws from the two Democratic senators. We will get "better judicial candidates who have the blessings of [Republican Representatives] Chris Cox, Dana Rohrabacher, and Ed Royce," said Steel, "than Feinstein and Boxer." Under the unusual and unprecedented arrangement Parsky made with the Democratic senators, there is now a six-member committee in each of the state’s four judicial districts. These committees are split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, and sign off on all potential federal judicial nominees in the state. The committees are charged with coming up with three candidates for every vacancy in their district. To be successful, a potential nominee needs to win the support of at least four of the six committee members. In other words, conservative nominees require support from at least one Democrat appointed by Boxer and Feinstein to have any chance of being nominated by President Bush. A conservative who gets past the committee then sits down with the 57-year-old Parsky, who interviews all three survivors of the Boxer-Feinstein gauntlet and makes recommendations to the White House on who should be appointed. Assisting Parsky in the process is Beverly Hills attorney Eric George, son of highly controversial California Chief Justice Ronald George, who cast the deciding vote on the state’s Supreme Court to strike down the state’s parental notification law. Steel and other conservatives maintain that the Republicans on the so-called "Parsky panels" are most often passive in the process, while the Democrats take their cue from Feinstein (who said earlier this year that Bush has "no mandate, in my view, to skew the courts to the right") and ask "litmus test" questions, including whether they support Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion on demand. (The Washington Times reported on June 3 that at least two potential candidates told the paper they had been asked these types of questions. Parsky told the paper he knew of one such incident, and that he told Feinstein and the panel members that such a line of questioning was not permissible.) Conservatives complain that Parsky & Co. have passed over aggressive Republicans in selecting the GOP halves of the judicial panels. (For example, they cite the case of much-respected retired Judge Sheldon Sloan of Los Angeles, who played a key role in helping former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson select state judges and whose appointment to the federal judicial panel was widely expected, but never happened. Asked by Human Events if he was "passed over" by Parsky for the panel, Sloan said, "No comment.") On the panel for the Los Angeles district are Orange County lawyer Tom Malcolm (who served with Sloan on Wilson’s judicial committee) and former Assistant U.S. Attorney Terry Bird, both of whom have decent GOP credentials. The third GOP panelist, however, is Elwood Lui, who was named to the Superior Court and Court of Appeals by former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown and who, according to one area Republican activist, "has never been seen at a Republican event nor known to write a check to a Republican candidate." Reached by Human Events at his Los Angeles office, Parsky defended the committee arrangement, although he insisted that "I didn’t create" the original proposal for panels, that it did not come from him but from White House political director Karl Rove and White House Legal Counsel Alberto Gonzales. "This has been mischaracterized, and to say ‘Parsky commission’ or ‘Parsky panel" is inaccurate," he told us. "[Rove and Gonzales] researched precedent and found there was none for selecting federal judgeships when a state has no U.S. senator or governor [from the President’s party]." Parsky added that the choices to fill the GOP slots on the panels "are the White House’s choice and all are strong Republicans. . . . [And] I only pass on people who satisfy the President’s judicial philosophy." Interestingly, Gonzales himself now appears to be having second thoughts about this judge-picking mechanism. In response to a question following his luncheon address to the American Law Institute on May 16, the President’s top lawyer said: "I haven’t been overjoyed at the way the commission process has worked in California . . . [I]n terms of how quickly the President was able to nominate judges to the bench, California is probably the last. And I think it was probably because of the commission structure." Sounding a lot like Chairman Steel, Gonzales went on to tell the luncheon that he believes bipartisan commissions in general are "an encroachment upon the powers of the presidency, in terms of limiting who he can look to within the state to nominate to the federal bench." (Gonzales however, appeared to backtrack in a subsequent letter to Feinstein and Boxer May 20. "[W]e support the California comission," he told the senators, "and we are pleased it has provided candidates that the President is proud to nominate.") Feinstein spokesman Howard Gantman insisted that his boss and Boxer are "pleased" with the current method. "We’ve been working very well with Gerry Parsky," he said. People for the American Way spokesman Elliott Mincberg echoed this judgment: "The commissions lower the temperature on lower court nominations. It puts the advice back into ‘advise and consent.’" And now the two senators from Washington State—left-wing Democrats Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell—are calling for a similar system for the selection of judges from their state. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- © Human Events, 2002