Wisconsin's nominating commission has long been held up as a model of how to recommend prospective federal judges in a bipartisan way.

But as the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., is complaining about being cut out of the process now that Democrats control the White House and both of the state's senate seats.

We're here if you want us.

That's the message from the American Bar Association as it awaits word about what role it will play in the judicial nominations process under President Obama.

The ABA certainly wouldn't mind regaining its special perch vetting potential appointees prior to their nominations.

That role ended in 2001 when the Bush administration decided to stop providing the ABA and its Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary with the names of potential nominees in advance.

The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee is urging President Obama to renominate some of his predecessor's appellate court picks as "a sign of bipartisanship." Conservative activists have been hoping that President Obama would make that gesture as a peace offering in the long-running partisan battle over appellate court nominations.

Specter pointedly reminded Obama that "throughout your campaign, you promised change and pledged to strive for bipartisanship in your administration."

President Obama's nominee for Solicitor General, Elena Kagan, is perhaps best known on Capitol Hill as a Clinton administration nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals to the D.C. Circuit whom Senate Republicans bottled up in 1999.

So it's interesting that Kagan now has been endorsed by none other than Miguel A. Estrada, a Bush administration nominee to the D.C. Circuit whom Democrats filibustered a few years ago, partly in retaliation for what Democrats saw as GOP mistreatment of Kagan and other Clinton judicial nominees.

You wouldn't think Estrada was inclined to do any favors for Democrats. But it turns out that he and Kagan have known each other ever since they were both eager young Harvard Law students.

Federal judges better not get their hopes up about the prospects for a pay raise in 2009.

Adam Schiff, D-Calif., a member of both the House Appropriations and Judiciary Committees, predicted Tuesday that it might be even tougher this year than it was in 2008 to get lawmakers to agree to authorize a cost-of-living (COLA) bump in judges' salaries, given the steadily worsening economy.

"It's a more difficult environment," said Schiff, who also co-chairs the Congressional Caucus on the Judicial Branch, which started with the aim of improving relations between Congress and the courts.

A raft of former government officials, military brass and judges weighed in at the Supreme Court Wednesday, on a case that;promises to provide the first clues about the Obama administration's detainee policies.

Former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and former FBI Director William Sessions;were among those who signed on to friend-of-the-court briefs in Al-Marri v. Pucciarelli, opposing the position that President George W. Bush had taken in the case.

The case originated as a test of Bush's position that the authorization for the use of force Congress passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks authorized him to arrest and indefinitely detain people -- in this case Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri,a Qatari citizen who was lawfully residing in Peoria, Illinois -- suspected of being involved in terrorism.

As head of the Justice Department's Office of Policy Development, Mark Gitenstein would play a key role in helping shepherd President Obama's judicial nominations.

He certainly knows how to scuttle one.

As chief counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee under Chairman Joseph Biden Jr., Gitenstein was in his own words "intimately involved" in the defeat of Robert H. Bork's nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987.

Conservative activists would like President Obama to make good on his promises of bipartisanship and resubmit some judicial nominees first put forward by his Republican predecessor.

They cite the precedent set by President Bush, who included among his first batch of appeals court nominees two Clinton holdovers: Barrington Parker, who now sits on the Second Circuit and Roger Gregory, who is on the Fourth Circuit.

Potential names put forward by conservatives include Paul S. Diamond, a district court judge in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania who Bush nominated to the Third Circuit, and Rod Rosenstein, the U.S. Attorney in Baltimore, who Bush nominated to the Fourth Circuit.

Attorney Alan I. Baron has carved out what is surely one of the most obscure niches for a Washington attorney: judicial impeachments.

For the third time, Baron has been tapped to by the House Judiciary Committee to serve as special counsel in the impeachment of a federal judge.

This time, Baron is leading the investigation into District Judge G. Thomas Porteous of Louisiana, who may have committed perjury by signing false financial disclosure statements.