The Strange Attack on Rebecca Taibleson - WSJ Editorial

Rebecca Taibleson clerked for the conservative icon Antonin Scalia, spoke up for Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and she says she’s an adherent of originalism. So what to make of the stones lobbed from the right at her nomination for the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals?

“I have had people reach out to me on this nomination more than any other judicial nomination in the second Trump term,” Sen. Ted Cruz said Wednesday at a hearing for Ms. Taibleson, a 42-year-old Wisconsin federal prosecutor. The anxieties on the right, Mr. Cruz added, “boil down to a concern that you’re secretly a closet liberal, and that you’d be an activist on the bench.”

Ms. Taibleson replied ably. “I was raised by a very conservative law professor,” she said. “It has stuck.” (Her father is George Mason University’s Michael Krauss.) Growing up, “it felt like we were the only conservatives at our Jewish day school in the 1990s,” she added. “Especially back then, if you were Jewish and conservative, you had to really mean it, and we did.”

Then she turned to complaints that her husband has donated to Democrats, including President Biden. “It is true that my husband and I don’t agree about everything in politics or the law,” she said, yet they’re united on “devotion to our children, our religious faith, love of this country,” and more. “Although I am quite certain my husband is wrong on many matters of policy and law,” she concluded, “I love him very deeply and we have a wonderful family life.”

(snip)

It’s impossible to know with certainty how any federal judicial nominee will rule in decades hence, and if the argument on the right were simply that she lacks a paper trail, that would be one thing. But the critics undermine their own case by going after her husband’s political views and making other unserious complaints.

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