Ammunition for the Nomination Wars to Come: A Citation to a Handy Study on ABA Bias

President Bush rejected the ABA’s input in regards to his judicial nominees because he believed, as many people have suspected for some time before Mr. Bush took his oath of office, that the ABA was unfair and biased in its evaluation of certain nominees.  In this post, Jonathon Adler discusses a new study showing that not only has the ABA historically been biased against more conservative nominees, it has also been somewhat biased against non-whites.   The study might be handy to keep in mind when responding to the upcoming reports from the MSM of how each of Obama’s activist judicial appointments “has been rated highly-qualified by the ABA.”  We haven’t read the study Adler refers to, but we suspect that Adler is correct in his psychologizing about an insulated liberal elite.  Nevertheless, we’ll go a step further and wonder aloud if the results regarding racial bias could be partially explained by looking into the pattern of ranking judicial nominees who are both ideologically conservative and racial minorities.  If you’ve lived through the nominations of Clarence Thomas or Janice Rogers Brown, you might suspect that the lawyerly Left has an intensified resistance to these candidates in particular.  (See, for example, this historical hitpiece on nominee Brown, an objectively qualified but conservative California Supreme Court Judge.)