Pickering also a closet racist: His nomination was opposed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Organization for Women, People for the American Way and other civil rights and civil liberties groups, who cited both his right-wing record on civil rights and his repeated attempts to conceal this record from the public and from the Senate.
In 1959, at age 21, Pickering wrote a law journal article supporting stronger laws against miscegenation (interracial marriage) in Mississippi. The state legislature later took action along the lines he recommended. In 1964, Pickering quit the Mississippi Democratic Party when it was forced to integrate its delegation to the Democratic National Convention, in the aftermath of the famous “Freedom Democratic Party” dispute. Like many reactionary white southerners opposed to the civil rights movement, he transferred his allegiance to the Republican Party.
In an effort to portray him as a civil rights “moderate,” Pickering’s supporters cite his stance in 1967, when he signed a statement opposing Ku Klux Klan violence in his hometown of Laurel, Mississippi. The statement was drafted by the moneyed establishment of the town, which opposed Klan terrorism as bad for business, however much they sympathized with the goals. The letter actually declared its support for defending “our southern way of life”—i.e., the system of Jim Crow racial segregation—and denounced “outside agitators” promoting integration.
Pickering did testify that year against a Klan leader, Sam Bowers, charged in the firebombing death of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmers. Subsequently, he was defeated for reelection as county attorney of Jones County. This political setback was not permanent, however, and Pickering was later elected to the state senate. There he was associated with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission, a state-supported group that carried on a campaign against desegregation well into the 1970s, in the guise of defending “states’ rights.”
Pickering became an ally of Trent Lott during this period, as Lott began a political career that took him to Congress and then the US Senate. At the 1976 Republican National Convention, Pickering was active in a campaign to put a plank in the party platform calling for an anti-abortion amendment to the US Constitution.
His long history in right-wing politics led to Pickering’s nomination to the federal bench by the first President Bush in 1990, when he was confirmed by the Senate without opposition. This was partly due to the cowardice and lack of principle in the Democratic Party, which had a comfortable majority in the Senate at that time, and partly due to Pickering’s barefaced lying: among other things, he told the Judiciary Committee under oath that he never had any contact with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and knew little of its activities.
His conduct as a federal judge gave further ammunition to those opposing his elevation to the second highest court. In a 1993 case he criticized the Supreme Court’s historic “one-person, one-vote” decision of the 1960s, calling it “obtrusive,” as well as expressing concern over the burdens the Voting Rights Act placed on local governments in the South.
The most serious issue raised by Pickering’s judicial record was his intervention at the 1994 trial of a man who was convicted as the ringleader of a cross-burning outside the home of an interracial couple. The attackers fired bullets into the couple’s home, endangering them and their two-year-old daughter.
Federal sentencing guidelines required a seven-year prison term for an assault involving arson, but Pickering opposed this as too severe, and met privately with the prosecutors to pressure them to drop the most serious charge and make a lighter sentence possible. In the course of this campaign, Pickering had highly unusual—and generally improper— ex parte communication with the Justice Department, and eventually succeeded in getting the racist attacker sentenced to only 27 months.
This is the man whom President Bush described, with unintended irony, as someone who shares “my philosophy that judges should interpret the law, not try to make law from the bench.” |
