That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which completes the saga of Bill Clinton’s abortive nomination of Georgetown law professor Peter Edelman to a D.C. Circuit seat in late 1994. As I discuss, my boss Orrin Hatch offered Edelman the consolation prize of a district-court seat, but Clinton ended up deciding that even that was too risky:
Two district-court seats opened up in the summer of 1995. Edelman explains what happened next:
So Ab [Mikva] called me all excited and said, “Okay, now there’s a seat, dust off your papers, we can move on it.” …
Time passes. I’d call Ab infrequently enough so that I’m not bothering, not a pest, but once every couple of weeks or so, What’s up? Oh, it’s coming along, just have to clear it. Finally, mid-July, somebody else tells me, maybe Maggie Williams [Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff] tells me, There’s going to be a meeting about you tomorrow with the President, and they’re going to decide whether to send your name up. I said, Oh? We’ll let you know what happens. I said, What’s that about? I don’t exactly know, she said, but I’m going to the meeting, I’ll do what I can.
I think the meeting gets postponed once, so maybe it’s two or three days later and she calls and says, They’re not going to send your name up. The President said it’s too close to election, and he just doesn’t want to start a whole other controversy when essentially we’re already into the reelection period.
Ah, yes, “it’s too close to the election” in the summer of 1995—more than fourteen months before the election—to make a district-court nomination that the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee had already committed to support. Either Clinton was very timid, or he viewed Edelman as politically toxic, or both.
Edelman wasn’t happy with how Clinton handled the matter, but he got his revenge one year later. Or so it seems.
Please subscribe to Confirmation Tales.