The Nation - News from June 20, 1989

Fourteen Republican senators, including Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the ranking GOP member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questioned the party loyalty of New York attorney Robert B. Fiske Jr. and, in a letter, urged President Bush not to nominate him as deputy attorney general. The senators contend that, during Fiske’s chairmanship of the American Bar Assn.’s Standing Committee on Federal Judiciary, the panel “improperly applied ideological criteria to thwart the nominations of various well-qualified candidates” whom then-President Ronald Reagan had nominated to the federal bench.