On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee moved forward with the nomination of Michael Brennan to the Seventh Circuit, the federal appeals court for Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin, despite a troubling record—and over a home state senator’s objections.
What’s so bad about Brennan? Well, he’s not shy about saying judges shouldn’t follow precedent.
[A] 2001 piece Brennan wrote for National Review … argued that judges appointed by George W. Bush should be free to only follow “correct precedent,” [and] that federal judges owe allegiance “to the Constitution and the laws of the United States, not to other judges’ interpretation thereof.”
Brennan’s “guest comment” is rife with searing indictments of “judicial activism” followed by slippery rationalizations for—you guessed it—judicial activism, if we understand that term to include advancing a political agenda from the bench.
You might also remember Brennan as the guy who refused to admit the presence of even implicit racial bias in the criminal justice system during his hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.