The article by Adam Liptak, in today’s Times begins with:
The conservative legal movement has made bold moves before, and it has long cultivated law students and young lawyers, partly to ensure a deep bench of potential judicial nominees. The Heritage Foundation, along with the Federalist Society, helped compile the lists of potential Supreme Court nominees from which President Trump chose his two appointees, Justices Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh. The two groups also helped identify many of the scores of Mr. Trump’s appointees to the lower federal courts.
But legal experts said the effort by Heritage to train and influence law clerks raised serious ethical questions and could undermine the duties the clerks have to the justice system and to the judges they will serve.
The following is my comment to the article:
Indoctrination is the nemesis of an open mind.
When a case makes it to the Supreme Court, by definition it has a history of divided appeals court perspectives. It is the values of Justices, and their clerks, even when couched in the idiom of precedents, that determine the decision. Bush v. Gore is the only one that admitted this, as it had the unique clause that this decision is not to be used for precedent. It could have been restated, "We award the Presidency to George W. Bush, because we have the power to do so"
More and more decisions could be defined as such. Now with this repulsive "training" where these scholars agree to secrecy, we have the evidence that the Heritage Foundation has nothing to do with scholarship, that deep endless dive into intellectual strands of thought. It now defines itself as a cult, such as Scientology, that are bound together by oath.
The constitution states that the president's selection of Judges is to be with the "advice" of a specific entity. Not a cult, or even his political party, but the Senate, that body that reflects the diversity of the country's people. When Trump states, and then restricted his selection of Justices to those of two partisan groups he had breached this constitutional requirement.
This three day seminar is the unlikely coda the pernicious destruction of the spirit of our Constitutional principles,
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Addendum:
I’ts rare to see actual changes in the subject that is written in The N.Y. Times or any newspaper and even rarer on a Dialykos Diary. But this one happened. The program isn’t necessarily cancelled, but at the least it is being revised, as the follow elements were deleted from the application form. At they least they are eliminating the confidential element, but the larger issue remains of indoctrimation of court clerks, especially those who will be at the Supreme Court.
12:50 PM Oct 18
THIS JUST IN
“Heritage is reevaluating the Federal Clerkship Training Academy. As a result, the program will not go on as scheduled.” – Greg Scott, director of media at The Heritage Foundation.