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| Dannehy — Connecticut Law Tribune |
A columnist has written a piece critical of Nora Dannehy, Governor Ned Lamont’s choice to fill an open position on Connecticut’s State Supreme Court, one of the few critical pieces written about Dannehy, who appears to be a shoe-in for the open position. The General Assembly is dominated by Democrats, few of whom would wish to oppose the nomination of Dannehy on pain of incurring frowns at tea time from majority members of Connecticut’s ruling party.
The nominee does not check the Democrat “diversity” box, the
columnist remarked. Following George Floyd’s assassination at the hands of a
police officer, “Lamont told members of the legislature’s Black and Puerto
Rican Caucus, ‘I need your help when recruiting not just teachers but judges…
we have a long way to go.’”
The columnist points out that “Lamont’s four nominees to the
State Supreme Court could be mistaken for the executive committee at the
Greenwich Country Club… He [Lamont} talks about diversity, but the state’s
highest court has been a no-go zone for transforming his words into meaningful
action.”
Dannehy, “the third of the seven justices on the court to
snag an appointment with no previous judicial experience… earned a place in the
state’s hall of heroes with her historic 2004 prosecution of felonious former
Gov. John Rowland,” for which Democrat polemicists will be forever grateful. But
– what should we make of Lamont’s challenge: “When I talk about diversity, it’s
not just race, color and creed… I think a diversity of background is really
important on the court.”
“Diversity,” like “equity,” has become a totem of the left
in the Democrat Party’s neo-progressive era.
Of course, no political commentary would be complete without
mention of former President Donald Trump, the Democrats favorite political
piñata. Dannehy, it transpires, returned to the Justice Department from a six
year stint as “United Technologies Corporation’s associate general counsel for
Global Ethics and Compliance,” to join “her former colleague John Durham to
investigate what then President Donald Trump called ‘the crime of the century,’
the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
Actually, Durham was called upon to provide definitive
counsel on Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI’s hapless investigation of claims made
by prominent Democrats, later determined to be based on fictitious “evidence,”
that Trump had “colluded” with Russian operatives to deny prospective Democrat
president Hillary Clinton entrée to the White House.
Following a richly detailed investigation, the Durham Report determined that the Democrat
approved Crossfire Hurricane version of history was, in large part, mendacious bunk.
Should any of these questions figure in Dannehy’s almost
certain appointment to Connecticut’s high court?
Would it be improper for legislators questioning Dannehy to
ask, “Do you agree with the conclusions presented in the Durham report?” Or,
“You disassociated yourself from the Durham investigation before a final report
had been issued. Why?” Or, “The Supreme Court recently reversed its Roe v. Wade decision. The high court
found that abortion, essentially a political matter, should be decided by state
legislatures, rather than judicial bodies. In Connecticut, the state
incorporated Roe v. Wade into its
statutes way back in 1991. Do you agree with the high court’s decision in Dobbs
v Jackson, which would seem to protect Connecticut citizens from future
high court and superior court decisions that in Connecticut affirms Roe v Wade through state statute?
Several blue states, Connecticut among them, are considering
denying Trump a place on state ballots. Do you consider such measures an
affront to “democracy?”
Given that 43 justices of the U.S. Supreme Court – some of
them, such as Felix Frankfurter, Louis Brandeis, Joseph Story, John Marshall
and John Jay, undoubted heroes of any prospective justice – had no trial
experience before being elevated to the high court, would you agree that
prospective justices who have had no trial experience should be eliminated as court justices?
This last question likely would be answerable, but not the
preceding questions listed above, many of which may be shunted aside by
pointing out that prospective justices are forbidden to answer questions, even
hypothetical ones, concerning any subject that may figure in future cases they
may be asked to adjudicate.
Because the legislature is forbidden to ask pertinent
questions and make pertinent remarks, it confines itself to impertinences such
as this one, a nuclear-tipped rhetorical missile lobbed in the direction of
prospective Supreme Court nominee Judge Robert Bork by U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy: “Robert Bork's America
is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks
would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens'
doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution,
writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors
of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for
whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that
are the heart of our democracy.”
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