The Hill reports that 24 leading conservative, led by former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese, have signed a memo urging a fillibuster, saying “Judge [David] Hamilton is precisely the kind of liberal judicial activist who would use our federal courts as his own superlegislature.”

Hamilton, a district court judge in Indiana, former Fulbright fellow and former general counsel to Democratic Senator Evan Bayh when he was governor of Indiana, has become the most controversial of President Obama’s nominees to a federal appellate court so far. Although he’s expected to get an up-or-down vote this week because Democrats control 60 seats in the Senate, a filibuster would be seen as an indication of how some Republicans intend to treat Obama’s future nominees.

Opposing the filibuster effort is Manuel Miranda, a former Senate Republican leadership aide and chairman of the Third Branch Conference, a conservative coalition actively involved in debating judicial nominations. It might have been hard for Miranda to support the filibuster, given that his group was formerly known as the “National Committee to End the Judicial Filibuster.” The group wrote to the Senate during the Bush administration in 2005 demanding that the filibuster of judicial nominees be stopped.

That hasn’t stopped others who signed that 2005 letter from calling for a filibuster of Hamilton now. The Hill reports that nine of those who opposed judicial filibusters during the Bush administration have now signed the Meese-led memo urging GOP senators to block a vote on Hamilton.

Last summer, Miranda himself cast aside his previous concerns about the filibuster and called on Republicans to block a vote on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

Dear Friends,

Respectfully, I disagree with this rally to “vote no on the cloture” for this or any nominee that one would expect a Democratic president to nominate, if the sole purpose is to block or “stop,” and not merely and genuinely to prolong a debate. Calling for a Democrat-style obstructive filibuster, that is likely impossible, is just another “throw them red meat” distraction and yet another easy out for a Republican leadership that has historically been to cool-for-school on judicial nominations.

We should ask Republican Senators to dedicate the time and effort needed to illustrate in vivid colors, on and off the Floor, the reasons why they believe this or any other judicial nominee should not have been nominated, and show the proof of why the elections of a president and senators have consequences.  This begins with Senator Sessions doing what his two predecessors never did.  Neither Hatch nor Specter ever went to the Chairmen’s Meeting and demanded more time and effort on judges, which is why other leaders had to lead that effort.

I won’t go into the error we Conservatives make in losing the high ground of defending the Constitution against the extra-constitutional use of the filibuster against judicial nominees.  There may be institution-based exceptions to a no filibuster stand, such as preventing windfalls from past obstructions, as in the 4^th Circuit, or preventing the godparents of obstruction like Cass Sunstein, Lisa Graves, etc., from being confirmed to a court.  But this is not that, and moreover a vote against cloture, with no other noticeable Floor effort, does not get the public attention that an honest up-or-down vote and statesmanlike Floor effort would get.

Best,

Manuel Miranda

Sam Alito — soft-spoken. John Roberts — affable and soft-spoken. Sanda Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter, all of them, soft-spoken. This nominee’s more like Judge Bork. She has a temper. She has an attitude. She could come across as hubristic in the hearings, as arrogant. And so she could Bork herself. It’s very possible.

I asked Miranda about the basis of this theory after the luncheon. “I’ve read Jeff Rosen’s piece ["The Case Against Sotomayor"],” he said, “and that’s what I’m going on. I haven’t met the lady.” He added this to “what I’ve heard from practitioners on the second circuit, and they don’t like her” and wondered if the coming American Bar Association survey of lawyers’ opinions of Sotomayor could reflect all of this negative feedback.

“When that survey comes out, if it reflects Jeff Rosen’s article, it could be pretty explosive. I think she she might want to take the committee on, to engage, in a Bork-like fashion. The more recent two [nominees] have been very disciplined, more controlled.”

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“Hispanic polls, Hispanic surveys, indicate that Hispanics think just like everyone else. We’re not like African-Americans. We think just like everybody else. When I was on the leader’s staff, someone called me once and asked me: ‘What’s Senator Frist’s Hispanic agenda?’ I said, ‘low taxes, better education, more jobs … what are you talking about?’ And that’s how Hispanics are. This is an opportunity to educate them on all of our issues and they will resonate in the way that they resonate with everyone else.”

African-American and Hispanic opinions didn’t actually diverge much in the last court fight: one poll on the confirmation of Samuel Alito found that African-Americans and Hispanics were split 50/50 on whether he should have been put on the court, although a greater number of African-Americans had no opinion. I talked with Miranda after the luncheon about whether he really wasn’t worried about a Hispanic backlash against the GOP if the Supreme Court fight got out of control — he considers it a possible problem, albeit a remote one if Republicans “fill the void” with substance.

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