When President Obama announced that he was nominating Solicitor General Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, issued a statement saying that Kagan had “a first-rate intellect,” but that she was “a surprising choice because she lacks judicial experience”:

There is no doubt that Ms. Kagan possesses a first-rate intellect, but she is a surprising choice from a president who has emphasized the importance of understanding ‘how the world works and how ordinary people live.’ Ms. Kagan has spent her entire professional career in Harvard Square, Hyde Park, and the DC Beltway. These are not places where one learns ‘how ordinary people live.’ Ms. Kagan is likewise a surprising choice because she lacks judicial experience. Most Americans believe that prior judicial experience is a necessary credential for a Supreme Court Justice.

Like his colleagues Sens. Mitch McConnell (KY) and Jim DeMint (SC), Cornyn’s experience attack is hypocritical, considering his past support for President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers (who had no prior judicial experience) to the Supreme Court in 2005. Salon’s Mike Madden notes Cornyn’s comments on Oct. 27, 2005 after Miers withdrew her nomination:

I mean, one reason I felt so strongly about Harriet Miers’s qualifications is I thought she would fill some very important gaps in the Supreme Court. Because right now you have people who’ve been federal judges, circuit judges most of their lives, or academicians. And what you see is a lack of grounding in reality and common sense that I think would be very beneficial.

Challenged about his hypocrisy in an interview on MSNBC, Cornyn defended himself by saying Miers had more “practical legal experience than Kagan.” “She, like Ms. Kagan, has not been a judge, and I don’t think that should be a disqualifier,” said Cornyn, ignoring his assertion that “most Americans believe that prior judicial experience is a necessary credential for a Supreme Court Justice.”

Roll Call reports another inconsistency in Cornyn’s rhetoric on Kagan today. Earlier this month, Cornyn was asked about the possibility of Obama nominating a woman to replace Justice John Paul Stevens and he replied that there are “a number of highly qualified [women], including Elena Kagan and Diane Wood.” A Cornyn spokesman claimed that “there was no contradiction in the Senator’s words since his earlier comments were about there being a wealth of female lawyers in the country.”

On “The Situation Room” this afternoon, former Bush counselor Ed Gillespie said that “it would be wrong” if President Obama looks at only women for potential Supreme Court nominees because he should be looking for “the most qualified candidates.” He explained that though Bush thought about nominating a woman to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, he just couldn’t find one with the requisite “temperament and intellect”:

BLITZER: You remember, your President — President Bush — he did find a woman, Harriet Miers, to be his nominee, and that didn’t exactly work out. Did he get gun shy after that?

GILLESPIE: He did not get gun shy after that, but I think that in the next round of the selection process, the person who emerged as clearly most qualified — really head and shoulders above others –was Samuel Alito, and there wasn’t a woman who was of a comparable experience and skill and temperament and intellect.

Watch it:

Matthew Yglesias has more on judicial qualifications.

Yesterday on The O’Reilly Factor, Karl Rove gave his “insights” into the Supreme Court nomination process. Rove talked about how prepared Bush administration officials were when they nominated their two justices and counseled the Obama administration to follow their example. He warned that “they cannot afford to have a vetting mistake after having five cabinet nominations or five administration nominations with tax problems”:

ROVE: I was part of a five party committee that spent years at the White House under President Bush preparing for the moment of the Supreme Court vacancy. We had thick notebooks on all prospects. We had everything from all of their writings and opinions to college transcripts to tax returns to, you know, charity dinner speeches, you name it. We had it. We studied those. It was why it was possible three months after a vacancy occurred to have Chief Justice John Roberts confirm to the Supreme Court. [...]

So I thought it was smart when President Obama said, you know, this is going to take at least six months. Because they do — they cannot afford to have a vetting mistake after having five cabinet nominations or five administration nominations with tax problems. They can’t offer up somebody they’ve not fully and completely vetted. And that takes time.

Watch it:

Rove left out one inconvenient detail: Harriet Miers. Justice Samuel Alito wasn’t Bush’s first choice to fill the vacancy left by Sandra Day O’Connor. Bush chose Miers, saying that her “talent, experience and judicial philosophy make her a superb choice to safeguard the constitutional liberties and equality of all Americans.”

However, Miers’s thin resume beyond being Bush’s loyal friend (she was head of the Texas lottery and a member of the Dallas City Council) generated opposition not only from liberals, but also from conservatives who were embarrassed by the pick. Less than a month after she was nominated, Miers was forced to withdraw her name from consideration.

Heckuva job, Rove.

Transcript: Read more

This morning on Fox News, former Bush political adviser Karl Rove criticized Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a potential nominee for the upcoming Supreme Court vacancy. “She could be even more liberal than Souter was,” Rove said. “She has a reputation on the Court of Appeals that she’s on for being very liberal.” He then argued that Sotomayor’s views would be cause for conservatives to oppose her, despite her qualifications for the position:

On the other hand, she’s also likely to draw opposition from conservatives because her opinions on the Circuit Court of Appeals have been very liberal and very expansive. In fact, this is going to be one the big dividing lines. President Obama…said he wanted a judge who would uphold the Constitution, but also a judge would be empathetic. These two things are in conflict.

Watch it:

Needless to say, Rove is being hypocritical. When he was shepherding Bush’s Supreme Court nominees through the process, he explicitly made the argument the President was owed deference to choose a qualified nominee and opposition party had a “responsibility to back” that pick. Here’s what Rove told the Washington Post in July 2005:

Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political architect, said precedents from the most recent Supreme Court vacancies suggest that opposition-party senators have a responsibility to back a president’s choice if they believe a nominee is qualified, even if they disagree with the person’s views. He also maintained that a strongly held ideological stance would not amount to “extraordinary circumstances” justifying a Democratic filibuster under a recent bipartisan Senate deal. [...]

Rove made clear that Bush will consult with senators in both parties, but that he has no interest in any kind of grand bargain between the White House and Congress in which legislators would give support in exchange for advance input on the president’s choice. Some Democratic groups have suggested that Bush seek an early consensus. Rove, however, cited his own weekend reading of the Federalist Papers to argue that the framers of the Constitution envisioned no such role for Congress, leaving the president alone to make nominations.

In the interview with Fox News this morning, Rove lauded the Bush White House’s preparedness for filling the Supreme Court vacancies when they arose and suggested the Obama White House is unprepared for making a nomination. It seems Rove has quickly forgotten his “active role” in the disastrous nomination of Harriet Miers, who came under relentless assault from Bush’s conservative base.

One year ago today, Alberto Gonzales resigned as Attorney General of the United States amid questions of his “competence to run the Justice Department” and “accusations of perjury.” As the Washington Post reported at the time, Gonzales was “one of the nation’s most controversial attorneys general since the Watergate era”:

[Gonzales's] resignation, submitted Sunday to President Bush and disclosed yesterday, removes one of the nation’s most controversial attorneys general since the Watergate era. He will leave behind a Justice Department battered by allegations that partisan politics has infected its law enforcement mission.

Gonzales’ departure from the Bush administration has done little to reverse the well-documented politicization of the Justice Department.

In recent months, his replacement — Micheal Mukasey — has refused to say whether he believes Gonzales politicized the department, has promised not to investigate officials who authorized the use of torture on detainees of the U.S. government, and has refused to review the qualifications of career employees hired by former loyal Bushie Monica Goodling. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) said recently, Mukasey “hasn’t provided the balance that I had hoped for.”

In April, the New York Times reported that Gonzales “has been unable to interest law firms in adding his name to their roster” as a result of his performance as Attorney General. Gonzales found work — at least temporarily — in June, when he was hired to “provide assistance to a special master on a patent case.”

Last week U.S. District Judge John Bates ruled that White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House counsel Harriet Miers must testify before Congress regarding their role in the 2006 U.S. Attorney purge. Today, however, Miers and Bolten requested that Bates stay his decision to provide time for them to appeal the ruling. In a court filing, they wrote:

Whatever the proper resolution of the extraordinarily important questions presented, the public interest clearly favors further consideration of issues before defendants are required to take actions that may forever alter the constitutional balance of separation of powers.

While the subpoenas expire in January, the case could make its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where Miers was once a nominee.