Cinde Warmington … Unqualified for the Executive Council

I saw Steve’s post about Cinde Warmington … an Attorney with Shaheen & Gordon and a candidate (Democrat, of course) for the Executive Council seat currently being held by Comrade Andru Volinsky, aka #VolinskyAgenda … so I decided to check out her positions on the issues.

Let’s start with confirming Judges, arguably the most important thing the Executive Council does. From a recent article in the Concord Monitor:

In July, Democrats on the council voted 3-2 against confirming Attorney General Gordon MacDonald to the Chief Justice post on the Supreme Court, citing his past positions against Planned Parenthood and a lack of judicial experience, and angering Sununu, who has not nominated an alternative.

Warmington has joined Plunkett in applauding that decision, pointing to MacDonald’s work for the Catholic Church in support of the state’s parental notification abortion law in a 2006 U.S. Supreme Court case involving then-Attorney General Kelly Ayotte. …

To Warmington, the Council’s decision on MacDonald was open and shut. …

Warmington cited what she said was MacDonald’s opposition to a right to choose abortion and opposition to voting rights. MacDonald’s office is currently defending HB 1264 in U.S. District Court, a case in which Christie, Warmington’s husband, is assisting plaintiffs. …

Sununu and other Republicans have blasted Democrats on the Council for what they see as a deviation from past traditions: keeping politics out of the selection of Supreme Court judges. But Warmington argued that political positions and other values are fair game when assessing someone with no court experience.

“If they’re a judge, that’s fairly easy. You can start, you know, you can look at decisions,” she said. “If they are not a judge, then you’re going to have to look to other political, public, other public positions that they may have taken in the past.”

Warmington either has no idea what the proper role of a judge under our system of government is, or she rejects that role and believes the judiciary should function as a Super-Legislature.

A person’s “political, public, other public positions” should be irrelevant to whether that person is qualified to sit as a judge. It is not the role of a judge, under our system of government, to impose his or her political/policy preferences on the rest of us. Rather, the judge’s job is to say what the law is … not what the judge thinks the law should be.

Warmington obviously believes just the opposite, with an important qualification. She believes that it is the role of the judge to override the elected branches only when the elected branches don’t reach the “politically correct” result and that, therefore, only persons who agree with her hard-Left politics should sit as judges.

To the extent that Warmington would argue that the lack of a judicial paper trail leaves the Executive Council no choice but to examine a nominee’s politics, she is full of baloney. As I discussed in a previous post, the criteria that the Executive Council should use to determine whether to confirm a judicial nominee are judicial philosophy, intellectual capacity, experience, integrity and demeanor. Examining the nominee’s views on diversity or intersectionality sheds no light on whether the nominee understands the role of a judge under our system of government and can carry out that role.

Moreover, it is fair to assume that all Warmington would be looking for when reviewing a judicial paper trail is that the nominee reached the politically correct result, even if that meant twisting, ignoring or rewriting the law in issue.

Warmington’s views on the judiciary are anti-democratic and anti-constitutional. Whether she just doesn’t understand the role of a judge under our system of government or she doesn’t care does not matter as to whether she is qualified to sit on the Executive Council. Either way, she is clearly NOT qualified.

Another important Executive Council responsibility is to review State contracts. Here is how she would approach that task:

“I think there are opportunities though where on some of these contracts, we can get in to the agency beforehand and let them know what we’d like to see in contracts,” she said. “A little opportunity to say ‘Hey, you know, I would like to see gender equity, I would like to see diversity, I would like to see fair wages in contracts.’ ”

In other words, instead of going with the low bidder, or the bidder with the track record of no overruns or delays, we go with the bidder with the most intersectionality workshops or safe spaces.

This is the antithesis of looking out for the taxpayers. It is ripping off the taxpayers to virtue-signal. And like her approach to judicial nominations, makes Warmington unqualified for the Executive Council.