Bush continues the Right Wing Zealot Agenda with more pathetic and dangerous picks for judges....he just DOES NOT GET IT....
Out of the Mainstream, Again
October 25, 2003
Of the many unworthy judicial nominees President Bush has
put forward, Janice Rogers Brown is among the very worst.
As an archconservative justice on the California Supreme
Court, she has declared war on the mainstream legal values
that most Americans hold dear. And she has let ideology be
her guide in deciding cases. At her confirmation hearing
this week, Justice Brown only ratified her critics' worst
fears. Both Republican and Democratic senators should
oppose her confirmation.
Justice Brown, who has been nominated to the United States
Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, has
made it clear in her public pronouncements how extreme her
views are. She has attacked the New Deal, which gave us
Social Security and other programs now central to American
life, as "the triumph of our socialist revolution." And she
has praised the infamous Lochner line of cases, in which
the Supreme Court, from 1905 to 1937, struck down worker
health and safety laws as infringing on the rights of
business.
Justice Brown's record as a judge is also cause for alarm.
She regularly stakes out extreme positions, often
dissenting alone. In one case, her court ordered a rental
car company to stop its supervisor from calling Hispanic
employees by racial epithets. Justice Brown dissented,
arguing that doing so violated the company's free speech
rights.
Last year, her court upheld a $10,000 award for emotional
distress to a black woman who had been refused an apartment
because of her race. Justice Brown, the sole dissenter,
argued that the agency involved had no power to award the
damages.
In an important civil rights case, the chief justice of her
court criticized Justice Brown for "presenting an unfair
and inaccurate caricature" of affirmative action. The
American Bar Association, all but a rubber stamp for the
administration's nominees, has given Justice Brown a
mediocre rating of qualified/not qualified, which means a
majority of the evaluation committee found her qualified, a
minority found her not qualified, and no one found her well
qualified.
The Bush administration has packaged Justice Brown, an
African-American born in segregated Alabama, as an American
success story. The 39-member Congressional Black Caucus,
however, has come out against her confirmation.
President Bush, who promised as a candidate to be a
"uniter, not a divider," has selected the most divisive
judicial nominees in modern times. The Senate should help
the president keep his campaign promise by insisting on a
more unifying alternative than Justice Brown.
nytimes.com
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