Why Ron Johnson Is Keeping A Wisconsin Law Professor Off The US Court Of Appeals

Freshman Senator Ron Johnson has been in office for seven months, but deems UW-Madison Law School Professor Victoria Nourse unqualified and is blocking her confirmation.

And a good thing he stepped in: look at her fly-by-night qualifications:

According to the White House, Nourse, 51, is currently the Burrus-Bascom Professor of Law at the University of Wisconsin Law School, which she joined in 1993. She has also taught at the Emory University Law School, the University of Maryland School of Law, Yale Law School, New York University School of Law, and Georgetown University Law Center.

Nourse has written extensively on criminal law, legislation, constitutional history and the separation of powers. She also assisted then-Senator Joseph Biden in drafting the Violence Against Women Act, part of the Biden-Hatch Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Nourse received her B.A. in 1980 from Stanford University and her J.D. in 1984 from the University of California, Boalt Hall School of Law.

Another website reveals more of these so-called 'qualifications:'

Professor Nourse has written over two dozen articles on Congress, statutory interpretation, constitutional history and the criminal law, published in Yale, Stanford, Penn, Texas and other law reviews. In 2009, she published 3 articles:   A Tale of Two Lochners in the California Law Review; The Lost History of Governance and Equality (with Sarah Maguire) in the Duke Law Journal; and Varieties of New Legal Realism:   Can a A New World Order Yield A New Legal Theory? (with Greg Shaffer) in the Cornell Law Review.  In 2010, she will publish a book review essay, Toward A Representational Theory of the Executive (with Jack Figura) in the Boston University Law Review and, in 2011, Misunderstanding Congress:  Statutory Interpretation, the Supermajoritarian Difficulty, and the Separation of Powers, in the Georgetown Law Journal.

Professor Nourse came to teaching after a series of assignments in Washington and New York. She was Senior Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee under the Chairmanship of then-Senator, now Vice-President, Joseph Biden where she was charged with drafting Senator Biden's Violence Against Women Act (see Equal:  Women Reshape American Law 309-444 (Norton 2009)). Professor Nourse came to the Judiciary Committee from appellate practice in the Justice Department, where she argued cases in the D.C. Circuit and other courts of appeal. Prior to that, she served as Special Counsel to the Senate Iran-Contra committee. She began practice in New York at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, after clerking for Judge Edward Weinfeld (S.D.N.Y). She is an order of the coif graduate of the University of California (Boalt) law school; and a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Stanford University.

Johnson is the owner of an Oshkosh (corrected) plastics company, an accountant and first-time office-holder who attended Tea Party rallies and decided to run for office after seeing Dick Morris on Fox News discuss the Wisconsin Senate race.

More context here.

Johnson is also blocking a separate nomination to the US District Court bench for former Wisconsin State Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler, but only because he can.