People for the American Way: Right Wing Watch Online
TAKE ACTION
"It is important to double efforts to get your boss to S-230 on time ... Fox News Channel is really excited about this marathon and Brit Hume at 6 would love to open with all our 51 senators walking onto the floor -- the producer wants to know will we walk in exactly at 6:02 when the show starts so they get it live to open Brit Hume's show? Or if not, can we give them an exact time for the walk-in start?"
- memo from Manuel Miranda, a staffer for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.)
Balancing the Scales of Justice
31 October 2003, Melody Barnes, Center for American Progress
That President Bush nominates conservatives to the bench is no surprise. But, Janice Rogers Brown, Claude Allen, and Charles Pickering have spent their careers on the radical edge of the right wing. Brown is an outspoken supporter of a return to a pre-New Deal -- that's Franklin Roosevelt-- perspective of the law. For those who don't want to dwell in the first third of the last century, that should be frightening. She argues that America has become a "nation of whiners" and that policymakers are "handing out new rights like lollipops in the dentist's office."
Likewise, The Richmond Times-Dispatch wrote that Claude Allen "has been on the conservative side of ideological battles on some of the most emotional political issues of the day -- abortion and child care, abstinence and sexual education, health care and welfare, Medicaid and the mentally disabled, cloning, stem-cell research and the right to die." In fact, Allen has spent little of his career practicing law -- five years less than the American Bar Association recommends for judicial nominees -- and most of it advocating for conservative policies.
There is plenty in Pickering's background to make the average person nervous: a law school article proposing changes to -- not the elimination of -- Mississippi's ban on interracial marriage; his 1973 Mississippi State Senate vote for a resolution to call a constitutional convention to consider an amendment banning race-based school desegregation orders; and a vote for a constitutional convention to overturn Roe v. Wade. But, it wasn't just Pickering's past that led the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject his nomination in March 2002 and all but two Democrats to oppose an effort to end debate on his nomination on Thursday. It was his willingness to abandon the law to reach a conclusion consistent with his views.
Each nominee's record displays a willingness to relentlessly pursue a personally satisfying result whether or not the result is supported by the law. Brown's disdain for the "lollipops" some call civil and constitutional rights has resulted in opinions that leave even her conservative colleagues baffled. So extreme are her views and so unconvincing were her answers at last week's Judiciary Committee hearing, Stephen Barnett -- a former Brown supporter and law professor emeritus reversed his position on her nomination. In his words, "to hear the views in these speeches expressed by a potential member of either the D.C. Circuit or the Supreme Court is just too scary."
FULL ARTICLE...
