quote:

Originally posted by ensigmatic:
I think he meant best writer of the possible SCOTUS nominees?

I've read Kethledge and Kavanaugh are supposed to be pretty good in that respect.

Oh. Well, on that, I have no idea. I think I have read at least parts of Kavanaugh opinions. If I have read some of the others, I’m not aware of it.

I believe I have read comments from others that both Kavanaugh and Kethledge are superb writers.

Kethledge has a book out, with another fellow. Lead Yourself First. https://www.amazon.com/Lead-Yo...ership/dp/1632866315

quote:

For a long time, I thought it would be terrific to have a regular column, witty, wise, sophisticated, you know, like a combination of Art Buchwald, George Will and Dave Barry. Alas, it isn’t as easy as those guys make it look.

Yes. I agree completely. Winston Churchill had a gift as well as you point out. It is just not a matter of schooling. I also admired Mike Royko as a writer and how he took on the Daley administration.

I wrote an article for publication several years back. It took extensive editing by my nephew who writes for a living to make it interesting. He has the gift.

That is what I meant--you can see my communication was not clear so I flunk the first requirement of a good writer.

BamaJeepster, I also use realclearpolitics.com as a source of opinion articles; they're good if you want to read both sides of an issue; or you can laugh at the drek put out by the likes of Eugene Robinson.

I'll note I do miss Tom Sowell's columns--reliably erudite and pithy.

quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
That is what I meant--you can see my communication was not clear so I flunk the first requirement of a good writer.

BamaJeepster, I also use realclearpolitics.com as a source of opinion articles; they're good if you want to read both sides of an issue; or you can laugh at the drek put out by the likes of Eugene Robinson.

I'll note I do miss Tom Sowell's columns--reliably erudite and pithy.

Looking back on this, and having read Bamajeepsters comment too, I believe my interpretation of your inquiry was guided by the several dozen or more articles, essays, opinion columns I read every day. Some of the ones I think have promise to stimulate discussion, or interest, I post here, and if I guess right, I get to enjoy the comments, reactions, further information, different points of view which result...... or not.

Maybe a clue?

Senator Orin Hatch as an op-ed in the Deseret News about the Supreme Court retirement and replacement. In it he writes, among other things,

quote:

Just as he did with Neil Gorsuch, the president has promised to nominate an impartial judge, a wise and seasoned jurist committed to upholding the Constitution at all costs. But no matter the nominee’s background or credentials, progressives will do everything they can to paint her as a closet partisan, if not an outright extremist. They will press, prod, and pry to unearth a radical agenda where none is to be found. They will pull out all the stops to accelerate the politicization of the Supreme Court — but they will have to go through me first.


For my part, I will do everything in my power to keep politics out of the confirmation process. As the senior member of the Judiciary Committee, I will fight to keep jurisprudence as the sole focus of our confirmation hearings. And I will devote all my energies to ensuring that we confirm the kind of Supreme Court justice America needs: a justice who says what the law is, not what she wants it to be; a justice who calls balls and strikes instead of swinging for the fences; a justice whose foremost allegiance is to the American people and to the Constitution.

[emphasis added]

Link

So does our Senator know, or doesn't he? I start thinking he does know, then I remember what RhinoSW mentioned about redirection. Senator Hatch is enough of a friend to the President it could go either way. He might know and be willing to help him redirect.

Could just be his preferred arbitrary pronoun rather than writing "he or she" or the misogynistic "he" (as is the case nowadays) or the godforsaken "they" to describe an unidentified individual.

Could mean nothing. Could mean everything. Who knows?

Balzé, you're not the only one looking at that.

Business Insider link

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Could just be his preferred arbitrary pronoun rather than writing "he or she" or the misogynistic "he" (as is the case nowadays) or the godforsaken "they" to describe an unidentified individual.

Somehow that does not strike me as something Sen. Hatch would indulge in. Ze is too much of a traditionalist. Why change now?

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by Balzé Halzé:
Could just be his preferred arbitrary pronoun rather than writing "he or she" or the misogynistic "he" (as is the case nowadays) or the godforsaken "they" to describe an unidentified individual.

Somehow that does not strike me as something Sen. Hatch would indulge in. Ze is too much of a traditionalist. Why change now?

He's retiring. Might as well go out with a bang.

Left drift is the biggest risk for anyone a Republican appoints to the Supreme Court. Barrett's relative inexperience on the bench is concerning to me. I think I would prefer Kethledge. But that is based almost purely on other people's opinions that I have read over the last few days.

If Amy Coney Barrett is selected she should wear a burka to the confirmation. The left would fall all over themselves voting for her.

quote:

Somehow that does not strike me as something Sen. Hatch would indulge in. Ze is too much of a traditionalist. Why change now?

I agree.

Although late in the process, some will enjoy this appraisal of candidate Judge Kethledge.


Bench Memo
National Review
Stephan Hessler

With Justice Kennedy’s retirement, President Trump has a unique opportunity to further solidify how the Supreme Court interprets the Constitution and federal statutes. Ideally he will select the judge on his list who best fits Justice Gorsuch’s mold — Raymond M. Kethledge.

President Trump was elected on the promise that he would nominate strong Supreme Court Justices. Exit polling showed that the Supreme Court was the most important issue to a full quarter of Trump voters, and an important issue to nearly all the rest.

So far, they have been vindicated. Justice Gorsuch has proven himself an apt replacement for Justice Scalia. He is already an anchor in the group of justices that bases its decisions on timeless principles rather than current passions. The president can now bolster that nascent majority.

To do so, he should nominate a jurist like Justice Gorsuch, which means the nominee would be both an originalist and a textualist. These beliefs are integral to the rule of law. And they are fundamental to protecting religious and other constitutional liberties — and to cabining the appropriate role of the administrative state.

I have known Judge Kethledge for almost 25 years, since we worked together on Capitol Hill in the mid-1990s. Ray was then, and has been since, a mentor — in every sense of the word. He helped me follow his path to the University of Michigan Law School, and he was the key recommender for my own judicial clerkships. I have sought Judge Kethledge’s advice at every stage of my career, and I am fortunate to be among the many to whom he has generously offered (though never dictated) his insight and counsel.

Even two decades ago, it was clear that Judge Kethledge venerated the Judiciary — and its proper, limited status within our constitutional design — and that he wanted enforcing that design to be his life’s work. From those core premises — modesty, integrity, respect — it naturally follows that Judge Kethledge would be an originalist and textualist. As he explained in a recent law review article, a judge’s task is to unearth “the meaning that the citizens bound by the law would have ascribed to it at the time it was approved.” Accordingly, “the judge who succeeds in that task thereby does her part to maintain our constitutional separation of powers.”

Judge Kethledge has spent the last ten years turning these beliefs into principles — and putting these principles into action in his service on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. As an originalist, “faithful adherence to the Constitution and its Amendments requires us to examine their terms as they were commonly understood when the text was adopted and ratified, rather than applying meaning derived years later that may weaken constitutional rights.” And when Judge Kethledge interprets a statute, he uses textualist tools for unearthing its meaning — such as the dictionary—as well as his own preternaturally good ear. As he says, “we have definitions for every word in the language, and rules of grammar, and, perhaps most important, our own ordinary usage of the language.”

Equally important is what Judge Kethledge does not do: He rejects the interpretive ruses that some judges use to enact their own policy preferences into law — and he does so in unequivocal terms. To cite only a few examples:

The improper purpose of legislative history “is often not to explain the statutory text, but to advocate — to convince the courts, or perhaps to allow them, to read into the text certain values that lacked the votes to be included there.” Judge Kethledge knows this firsthand; when working for the Senate, watching others draft legislative history was “rather like being a teenager at home while your parents are away for the weekend: there was no supervision.”

Judge Kethledge dismisses requests to apply legislative purpose from general principles drawn from scattered laws, rather than the words of the statute at issue as “more impressionistic than legal.” To him, “statutes are not artistic palettes, from which the court can daub different colors until it obtains a desired effect.” Nor is a judge’s role “to fashion a sort of judicial string theory, under which we develop universal principles that harmonize different statutes with different language. Our task instead is to apply the words of the statute at hand.”

And Judge Kethledge rejects arguments based solely on policy: “Neither policy concerns, nor some general sense of the statute’s overriding purpose, nor the spirit of the age, provides us with any lawful basis to do what” Congress could have done “with a few keystrokes”—yet did not. Judges are “confined to what the law says.”

Each tactic has the same end: to empower the judge to make a decision based on something other than what elected representatives voted upon. Thus, as cogently explained by Judge Kethledge, doing so would impermissibly arrogate to the Judiciary the responsibilities the Constitution assigns to the Legislature.

Finally, as the above passages demonstrate, Judge Kethledge is a gifted writer. His prose is candid and his metaphors are well-deployed. His opinions are self-evidently the product of a life of reading — and not only Strunk and White (his copy undoubtedly by now in tatters). Unsurprisingly the Wall Street Journal in 2014 dubbed one of Judge Kethledge’s decisions the “Opinion of the Year.” A dissenting colleague once claimed that Judge Kethledge’s majority opinion mistook where “the beaches of Normandy lie” in the case — to which Judge Kethledge replied that “where the dissent actually finds itself . . . is at Pas de Calais,” where the Allies had tried to trick the Germans into thinking the D-Day invasion would land.

Strong writing is not merely a bonus in a Supreme Court Justice. It is a necessity. Only a Justice with the ability — and the courage — to write persuasively can continue to prove the wisdom of originalism and textualism to future generations.

In sum, personally and professionally, not only Judge Kethledge’s intelligence, but also his decency and humility, have exemplified his life and career. We will be fortunate if he has the privilege to continue these pursuits as a justice of the Supreme Court.

Link

IIRC, National Review was firmly in the Never-Trump camp. They may have just killed his nomination.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
IIRC, National Review was firmly in the Never-Trump camp. They may have just killed his nomination.

The National Review doesn’t go camping, AFAIK. The writers go all over the moderate and conservative landscape.

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
IIRC, National Review was firmly in the Never-Trump camp. They may have just killed his nomination.

The National Review doesn’t go camping, AFAIK. The writers go all over the moderate and conservative landscape.

I hope that is a nuance that Trump appreciates, as I'm hoping for Kethledge. 'Cuz everybody loves Raymond.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
IIRC, National Review was firmly in the Never-Trump camp. They may have just killed his nomination.

The National Review doesn’t go camping, AFAIK. The writers go all over the moderate and conservative landscape.

I hope that is a nuance that Trump appreciates, as I'm hoping for Kethledge. 'Cuz everybody loves Raymond.

I doubt Trump reads Bench Memos from NR, or worries much about what is written there.

Kethledge has a lot going for him, as do the others. Their similarities are different, as Yogi would say.

He has been in the bench 10 years, so is very experienced. He is young enough, age 51, that if he doesn’t get the nod this time, he will be prime candidate for the next one.

The sixth paragraph of Stephan Hessler's Memo posted by JAllen refers to a judge as 'her'?

“the judge who succeeds in that task thereby does her part to maintain our constitutional separation of powers.”
Is it some idiosyncrancy in the legal world to refer to judges as 'her'?

Another former clerk chimes in.

Judge Raymond Kethledge and the Second Amendment

National Review
Donald Burke



Judge Raymond Kethledge vigorously defends — and exercises — individual rights under the Second Amendment. On the bench, he has faithfully applied the Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, and ruled that Second Amendment rights deserve at least as much protection as any others. Off the bench, he is an avid hunter and a lecturer on originalism, textualism, and the Second Amendment.

Perhaps the most important Second Amendment case to come before the Sixth Circuit in the last few years — so important that the court took it en banc — is Tyler v. Hillsdale County Sheriff’s Department. The case dealt with a federal statute that barred anyone who had ever been involuntarily committed from owning a gun. Although Clifford Tyler had enjoyed decades of good mental health, the statute barred him from owning a gun because he had been involuntary committed — one time — 28 years earlier.

In a divided vote, the court held that Tyler had plausibly alleged that the statute violated his Second Amendment rights. Judge Kethledge went further still. Joining an opinion by Judge Sutton, he concluded that the statute, as applied to Tyler, did violate the Second Amendment because Tyler had not received an individual adjudication before he lost his rights.

Kethledge thus eschewed the debate between strict and intermediate scrutiny that occupied most of the court. These so-called tiers of scrutiny require the government to show that statutes infringing on a constitutional right serve an important interest and relate closely to that interest; under strict scrutiny, the interest must be compelling and the statute narrowly tailored. In too many cases, these flexible tests empower judges to substitute their own policy preferences for the law — first by selecting the applicable standard (seemingly at random in many cases) and then by decreeing which governmental interests count as compelling and which do not. Thus, in his dissenting opinion in a case involving the Virginia Military Institute’s all-male admission policy, Antonin Scalia warned that judges’ abstract legal tests can never supersede our “constant and unbroken national traditions.”

Judge Kethledge understands that lesson, which is why his position in the Tyler case faithfully applied Justice Scalia’s opinion in Heller. There, the Supreme Court recognized two narrow exceptions to the general rule that citizens have the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense — for felons and for the mentally ill. Kethledge recognized that, under Heller, the government was required to show that Tyler fell into one of these historically recognized categories before it could strip him of his Second Amendment rights. Specifically, he concluded that the government must not merely argue about interests and tailoring, but provide gun owners like Tyleran individual adjudication as to their mental health. In this way, Judge Kethledge honored the principles set out in Heller and showed that he sided with Justices Thomas and Scalia in concluding that Second Amendment rights must be protected to the full extent of their historical scope.

Kethledge’s commitment to the Second Amendment extends beyond the bench. In his public speeches, he has taught students and lawyers about originalism — the methodology that Justice Scalia used in Heller to confirm that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess firearms for self-defense, not just the militia. According to Judge Kethledge, judges must answer constitutional questions not by consulting their own policy preferences or the evolving consensus in elite law schools, but rather by ascertaining “the meaning that the citizens bound by the law would have ascribed to it at the time it was approved.” That is precisely the approach taken by Scalia’s majority opinion in Heller, which devoted more than 30 pages to analyzing the meaning of the Second Amendment at the time it was adopted.

Likewise, in moderating a Federalist Society panel on the Second Amendment, Kethledge suggested — as Justice Thomas has recently — “that the lower courts have not been faithfully applying Heller, as to methodology and also as to sort of the rigor of their scrutiny.” And in response to the misconception that the Second Amendment applies only to muskets and bayonets, he explained that, today, the Second Amendment protects modern weaponry just like “the First Amendment protects the Internet.”

In his personal life, Judge Kethledge exemplifies the kind of robust and responsible gun ownership that the Heller Court recognized to be at the core of the Second Amendment since the founding era. Kethledge has hunted in northern Michigan every year for over two decades, usually in the Huron-Manistee National Forest. And when his son, Ray, Jr., came of age, the two Rays started hunting together, just like generations of Americans before them. The same goes for self-defense: In addition to many years owning rifles and shotguns, Judge Kethledge has for over a decade carried a .40 Glock 27 for personal protection (with an active conceal-carry permit).

It is thus no surprise that Judge Kethledge has likened hunting to judging — a comparison that may make him unique among federal judges. In a recent speech to the Federalist Society chapter at the University of Michigan law school, Judge Kethledge used his experience hunting for partridge to illustrate his concern that the Chevron doctrine has made courts defer too readily to federal agencies’ interpretations of the law:

Around this time of year I like to hunt for grouse (or partridge, as we call them in Michigan) with my son in the forests Up North. Sometimes the birds are in cedar swamps that are full of alder bushes and dense secondary growth. More than once I’ve decided that, even if the birds are in there, it’s not worth pushing through all those branches to get to them. Interpreting statutes like the Clean Air Act is often similar. The statute presents a dense undergrowth of sections and subsections and subsections within those. The answer to the specific question in the case might lie somewhere in those sections and subsections, but working through them is hard. And meanwhile the agency is there to offer a path already cleared. Down that path might lie a woodcock rather than a partridge, but both are game birds, and the judge might be tempted to conclude that under the circumstances a woodcock is good enough. And so in agency cases it often seems that the court pauses only briefly at step one, without much effort to hack through the undergrowth, before proceeding straightaway down the cleared path of step two.

As one of Judge Kethledge’s former law clerks, it should go without saying that I would be very pleased to see him selected to fill the upcoming Supreme Court vacancy. To be sure, he is one among a number of impeccably well-qualified candidates, each of whom can be expected to discharge that responsibility ably. What is absolutely clear to me is that all Americans would find in Judge Kethledge a justice who is as committed to originalism and textualism as he is to the Second Amendment and the American way of life.

Link