Armageddon is approaching! So says People for the American Way in its latest fundraising appeal, er, news alert about impending judicial confirmation battles.
For the first time in 16 years, Republicans control judicial nominations and confirmations. On the Senate’s opening day, President Bush sent them 31 nominees, each a victim of the Democrat obstruction that stalled so many good nominees in the last two years. The 14 appeals-court nominees have languished an average of 506 days and 11 never received the courtesy of a hearing.
These nominees are desperately needed. Though President Bush made 45 percent more appeals court nominations than previous presidents in his first two years, the Senate confirmed 42 percent fewer. As a result, appeals court vacancies have averaged 50 percent higher than during the Clinton years.
More than half of these re-nominations are to “judicial emergency” positions. One seat on the Sixth Circuit has been open for 1,220 days, one on the Fifth Circuit open for 2179 days, and one on the Fourth Circuit for 3,106 days. President Bush nominated someone for each of these and other long-standing vacancies way, way back on May 9, 2001.
PAW is as dishonest as ever. Claiming some sort of danger from Republican-appointed judges, PAW’s Jan. 6 e-mail warned that “seven of the nine current Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Rarely, if ever, in our history has the entire federal judiciary been dominated by the appointees of one political party.” Such claims can sometimes be either misleading or false. This one is both.
It’s misleading because those seven Republican appointees include liberal activists such as Justices John Paul Stevens and David Souter. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the opinion in Romer vs. Evans condemning opposition to special rights for homosexuals as nothing more than hatred. He wrote the opinion in Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition striking down a ban on virtual child porn and arguing that this garbage “might have significant value.” That should make PAW giddy.
PAW’s claim is completely false because, even after 100 Bush judicial appointments, the judiciary is today only evenly split between Democrat and Republican judges. President Clinton’s 374-1 judicial appointment run had left the judiciary solidly in Democrat control, and some individual courts are in full leftward tilt. More than two-thirds of the Sixth and Ninth Circuits, for example, are Democrats. In each case, President Clinton alone appointed more than half the judges.
The Armageddon PAW promises will begin with another leftist assault on President Bush’s Fifth Circuit nominee, Charles Pickering. First nominated nearly two years ago, Judge Pickering endured two Judiciary Committee inquisitions before becoming only the fifth nominee in 60 years to be voted down there. Democrats took that step because Judge Pickering has solid support in the full Senate.
When leftists claim that Judge Pickering, who has served a dozen years on the U.S. District Court in Mississippi, is “hostile to civil rights,” stop a minute and ask what that really means. It cannot mean he is personally hostile to civil rights. As a local prosecutor 35 years ago, he testified against the Imperial Wizard of the KKK and helped the FBI investigate others, at great risk to himself and his family and later the loss of re-election. He chaired a race relations committee in his home county in the 1980s and has served on the board of the University of Mississippi’s Institute for Racial Reconciliation since the 1990s.
Nor can it mean he is judicially hostile to civil rights. He has the stamp of approval from no less than the liberal American Bar Association, the sensitivity police of the judicial selection process. The ABA gave Judge Pickering its highest “well qualified” rating. Its criteria include such things as “compassion … freedom from bias, and commitment to equal justice under law.” In fact, the ABA rated him “qualified” when appointed to the district court in 1991 – he must be more compassionate, more free from bias and more committed to equal justice than ever!
So what’s left? This “hostile to civil rights” thing is really code for “hostile to the leftist political agenda.” That, after all, is why the left is so obsessed with controlling the judiciary. They care nothing for freedom or democracy, but about power and control. If the American people won’t accept the leftist agenda willingly, they will be made to do so by court order.
Some question re-nominating Judge Pickering, especially after Sen. Trent Lott’s remarks last month. Presidents routinely re-submit at the start of a new Congress nominations left unconfirmed by the previous one. This is not about Sen. Lott, and it’s not about race. It’s about the appointment of a well-qualified, fair and decent man. It’s about judges who refuse to impose any political agenda, but simply follow the law.
So if Armageddon is upon us, so be it. The good guys win.
