Lisa Graves: Will Amy Coney Barrett Stand by Her Man? He's Betting a S... (1)
I have never seen a president in my lifetime that has disavowed the results of the election before they've even happened.
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Lisa Graves returns to discuss President Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court. A trained lawyer, Ms. Graves is one of the nation's foremost experts on judicial appointments. She served as chief counsel for nominations for the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and as a career deputy to two attorneys general, one a Democrat, the other a Republican. She has spent the past ten years investigating the impact of dark money on judicial selection, public policy, and elections. She is currently Executive Director of True North Research, a nonprofit watchdog group focused on legal policy and ethics in federal and state government. Here to talk with Lisa Graves is Bill Moyers.
BILL MOYERS: Thank you, Lisa, for taking my call.
LISA GRAVES: My pleasure, Bill. Thank you so much for calling me.
BILL MOYERS: What exactly does it mean to be the chief counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee for nominations of federal judges?
LISA GRAVES: My job was to vet the judicial nominees and the U.S. Attorney nominees that were being put forward by President George W. Bush in his first term in office. My job was to review their background, review any information available about them, and make recommendations about whether they were people who had the demeanor and the temperament and the record of fairness to become a federal judge for a lifetime position on our federal courts.
BILL MOYERS: And you also served as deputy assistant attorney general under two attorneys general, one a Republican, the other a Democrat.
LISA GRAVES: That's correct. I was a career deputy assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice under both Ms. Reno and Mr. Ashcroft. And for the first part of 2001, my job was to aid in the orderly transition of government and to advise Mr. Ashcroft in particular on judicial nominations on a relationship with the federal judiciary and the state judiciary.
BILL MOYERS: You know the nominating process inside and out, right?
I personally think it's important to talk to the American people about the courts and what's at stake… I think that that case needs to be made not just to not fight about the courts but to basically tell the American people quite plainly how important the courts are.
LISA GRAVES: I do. I both worked in it for several years and have been a student of it for many years before that.
BILL MOYERS: What do you think of how President Trump and the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, are doing in rushing Amy Coney Barrett's nomination through the Senate in just a matter of weeks if not days?
LISA GRAVES: I think what's happening with the Senate and with this White House in terms of the Supreme Court is profoundly illegitimate for a number of reasons. First, the election is literally weeks away and this president has said expressly that he wants someone confirmed so that he can have a vote on that court to win the litigation that he and his team are planning to bring to that court. That's just profoundly illegitimate. It's also the case that President Trump and his campaign team are doing enormous fundraising to try to use this nomination to an independent branch of our government in order to advance his own partisan political interests and try to push Amy Barrett onto the court really for the next 30 or 40 years. So, no matter what happens in terms of his election, Trump's election, if they're successful, he will have placed three people on the Supreme Court, two of them basically due to vacancies during election years. And as you know, the other part of that story is the just extraordinary hypocrisy of Mitch McConnell, of Senator Lindsey Graham, of other senators who stalled a nomination by President Obama for months. Justice Scalia passed away in February of 2016. And the Republicans refused to allow Judge Merrick Garland a hearing, for months, even though Judge Garland had been on the bench in the D.C. circuit for many years and was well-regarded as a fair judge. Here you have a nomination that's only been vacant for a week or so, and a rush to push someone through at all costs, and to put someone on the court who I think does have a troubling record.
BILL MOYERS: But the Constitution is silent on the issue of when a president who has the power and responsibility of appointing Supreme Court justices should make that appointment. I mean, the fact that it's near an election is a coincidence. So, what makes this illegitimate?
LISA GRAVES: Well, it's certainly the case that the Constitution provides for the power of the president to propose a nomination. It doesn't put any time limit on it. But the fact is that historically, it has been the case that the Congress has been reluctant to approve nominations in election years, in part because the notion is that the American people are about to decide the course of the nation. Back in 2016 that Supreme Court seat of Justice Scalia's sat vacant for basically almost an entire year. There was no crisis on the court as a result of that vacancy. And the Republicans expressed no urgency to move a nomination forward. And so, in this situation, you have a case where, unlike back in 2016 where you had a president who was elected twice to the presidency, here you have someone who won the election in 2016 without the popular vote. You have a president who's been impeached by the House of Representatives. I understand that this Senate did not vote to actually remove him from office. But you have serious allegations that face this president on both foreign and domestic issues about his fitness to be the president of the United States, a decision that the American people will be facing in these coming weeks. And this is no time to rush through an irrevocable decision on the part of this president to put someone on the Supreme Court who is in her late 40s. And she's been a judge for a very short period of time. I think that there are a lot of troubling components to the nominations process as it's unfolded over these many years. At the beginning of our nation's history, people served on the court only ten, maybe 20 years due to life span of people back then. And also, the notion that people needed to have a really long and established career to have that role. Now you have people who are being appointed and they're serving not just for a decade or two but for generations. In my lifetime, for the last 52 years, there have been 19 people appointed to the United States Supreme Court. Fifteen of those nominations have been made by Republican presidents and confirmed. Only four of the confirmed justices who have been appointed in my lifetime were appointed by Democrats. And so, at one point last week, Senator Mitt Romney said, you've got to get over the idea of there being a liberal Supreme Court. And I thought, “What liberal Supreme Court?” We have a court that's been dominated by one party through these appointments. The Republicans have chosen very young people for those positions. And, in fact, that was the plan of the Republican appointment of Justice Thomas, who was in his early 40s at the time he was appointed. He's now in his early 70s.
BILL MOYERS: The Republicans have long treated control of the Supreme Court as a very important political issue. Electoral issue. Election issue. The Democrats have not. The Republicans have outsmarted the Democrats on the evaluation they place on the political aspects of the Supreme Court.
This president is trying to secure for himself an illegitimate victory in this election. He has said he is going to win on the in person voting. And that any ballots that come in or that are counted afterward are somehow illegitimate, that they have to be thrown out. And he has said quite clearly he's going to take this to the Supreme Court.
LISA GRAVES: It is the case that the Republicans have really politicized the courts in that way, while they claim that the Democrats have. The court that they complained so much about, the one historically complained about, was the Warren court. That was led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. And that court in my view, really did a tremendously valuable job for the country, because what it actually did was to read the Constitution to apply its terms to ordinary people. So equal protection of the law—
BILL MOYERS: What do you mean?
LISA GRAVES: Using that phrase in our 14th Amendment that people will not be denied equal protection to ensure that Americans could not be segregated in our schools through racial segregation. That was attacked vociferously on the right as an inappropriate and outrageous decision. It was following the plain language of the Constitution. The Warren Court ruled that when the Constitution says you have a right to counsel in the case of Gideon v. Wainwright, that you actually have a right to counsel. And so, there were a number of decisions in the '50s and '60s that the right wing, they called themselves conservatives or libertarians, opposed. And in the aftermath of those decisions the Republicans really began running on a claim with Richard Nixon of supposed law and order. Part of that law and order campaign was about the courts and trying to pack the courts with people who he thought would reverse those rulings that gave meaning to people's rights that were listed and written in the Constitution. And then Ronald Reagan went a measure further. He decided to say that he, through his attorney general Edwin Meese, at the time, was going to have a litmus test about abortion, that he would only appoint someone to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade. With Reagan, there was a specific determination, to appoint people basically pretty far to the right at the time. They did manage to get Justice Scalia on the court, and they did manage to put William Rehnquist [as Chief Justice] on the court, who'd been an advisor to President Nixon. And then it was 12 years of real court packing by Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush. And when Clinton came into office in the early 1990s the path he chose was one to say that litmus test was wrong and that we needed fair judges. And so, the effort was articulated as trying to put people of moderation on the court. I personally think it's important to talk to the American people about the courts and what's at stake. And talk about how people are being put on the courts by the right, by the Republicans, in order to overturn precedent. In order to overturn our rights. I think that that case needs to be made not just to not fight about the courts but to basically tell the American people quite plainly how important the courts are.
And this movement that's underway to overturn those rights. I would say to you one of the things that came out in an investigation by THE WASHINGTON POST last May by Robert O'Harrow and Shawn Boburg was that Leonard Leo, who's been working on helping to pack the courts for, almost two decades or more now—
BILL MOYERS: Leonard Leo, tell me who he is.
LISA GRAVES: Leonard Leo, for many years served as the vice president of the Federalist Society. And he is still an advisor to the Federalist Society.
