Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee who stated yesterday that Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor may be an “activist judge,” takes judiciary advice from Thomas Jipping, the director of the ultra-conservative Free Congress Foundation’s Center for Law and Democracy who leveled the same charge at Sotomayor in 2000 and once tried to savage Janet Reno’s confirmation as Attorney General.

“Facts and common sense were not, however, similarly important to Clinton-Gore Judge Sonia Sotomayor, also said to be on Gore’s Hispanic short list,” Jipping wrote in WorldNetDaily on Oct. 26, 2000. “She dissented with the typical activist view that reality is whatever she says it is.”

In 1993, Jipping was one of a number of conservative activists who spread false rumors to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Reno, such as that she “had been stopped on several occasions for drunk driving but received favorable treatment from police and was never charged.”

The spreading of these rumors aggravated Hatch, who said, “This hate-mongering campaign is despicable to my mind.”

This episode must have vacated Hatch’s mind quickly, as he has paid Jipping more than $240,000 as a judiciary advisor since 2003. And the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee must have amnesia as well. The committee has paid Jipping more than $115,000 over the past two years.

Jipping, who opposed “activist” Sotomayor in 2000, later criticized Democrats for using the term “activist” as the basis for their opposition to a Bush nominee. In 2003, when Democrats filibustered Miguel Estrada’s nomination for a federal appeals court, Jipping wrote:

“It should be obvious by now that, on orders from their leftist constituency groups, Senate Democrats have only one goal. They do not care about an independent judiciary, they do not care about the rule of law. They want a judiciary that will, by hook or by crook – by any means necessary – deliver the leftist political agenda. Judges who even might respect the American people, their values and their decisions are unqualified ‘extremists’ and ‘activists’ and subject to filibuster.”

Thus, it will be interesting to see if Hatch chooses to filibuster Sotomayor, based on advice from Jipping, on the grounds that she is an “activist judge.”

UPDATE:

In an interview with Sean Hannity last night, Sen. Hatch responded to Judge Sotomayor’s assertion that the Court of Appeals is “where policy is made.”

Hatch stated:

That was certainly unfortunate language and she shouldn’t be making those kind of comments. No judge should make those kind of comments because judges - you know, in this case we’re talking about the highest court in the land, the court of last resort, the court where the judge’s personal predilections or policy preferences should not be - should not necessarily be followed.

In other words a judge ought to be doing what’s right within the law. They’re not super-legislators from the bench. They shouldn’t - you usurp the powers of the other two branches of government, the executive and the legislative branches of government.

This has been debunked as faux controversy, but I would attack this quote too if I were a Republican and had no legitimate basis to oppose Sotomayor’s candidacy. That is, unless I had defended a different D.C. Circuit nominee against charges of “judicial activism” when she said that judges should not adhere to established legal precedents. The Washington Post reported in 2005 (my emphasis added):

Several Democrats noted that in a dissenting opinion in California, [Janice Rogers] Brown wrote, “We cannot simply cloak ourselves in the doctrine of stare decisis, ” the Latin term for the principle that courts should follow precedent decisions. “She is the epitome of an activist judge,” Reid said, needling conservatives who long have decried “judicial activism.” Brown “is a judge; she is not a legislator,” Reid said. “She has no right to do the things that she does.”

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) strongly defended Brown and denounced Democrats for targeting conservatives with “strongly held personal beliefs.” He said Brown, “an eminently qualified jurist, was one of the primary targets of this radical strategy. For a few thought-provoking speeches that she had given, some have tried to label her too extreme for the bench.”

And here I thought Hatch’s opposition to “judicial activists” was based on principle…