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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (226369)	2/9/2002 2:31:42 PM
From: gao seng	Respond to of 769670

Chairman Neas The liberals' puppet master. Friday, February 8, 2002 12:01 a.m. EST By all normal appearances Senate Democrats were in charge of yesterday's hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But anyone who knows anything about modern legal politics knows that the real chairman was the talkative fellow holding court with the press corps in the hallway nearby. That man is Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way and ringleader of what promise to be years of attacks on President Bush's judicial nominees. Politically speaking, he's Edgar Bergen and Senate liberals are his Charlie McCarthys. He gives them their attack themes, and they then repeat them to skewer some hapless nominee who thinks a judgeship is going to be the capstone of his career. Yesterday Democrats sang Mr. Neas's tune while pounding appeals-court nominee Charles Pickering Sr. as some kind of 1950s racist. For Mr. Neas, this is like old times. His main contribution to American politics is the verb "to bork," defined as vilifying a judicial nominee in order to block his confirmation. He orchestrated the original borking, against Robert Bork in the late Reagan era, but has also lent his expertise to the trashing of Clarence Thomas and a host of other conservative nominees. Now, after eight years in hibernation, Mr. Neas is back, this time giving attack orders to Judiciary Chairman Pat Leahy. And he hasn't lost his touch. All the hallmarks of the Neas method are on display in the borking of Mr. Pickering, a federal district judge since 1990 and Mr. Bush's nominee for a seat on the Fifth Circuit: The phalanx of liberal interest groups, the press leaks and shameless appeals on race and abortion. And, of course, the Senators themselves, all lip-synching lines from Mr. Neas's anti-Pickering position paper. The document is so full of half-truths and deliberate omissions that even Legal Times, no friend of conservatives, felt compelled to report that "You won't get the full story on Charles Pickering Sr. from liberals' portrayal of his life and record." To play the race card, Mr. Neas dug back more than 40 years to condemn Judge Pickering for expressing "no moral outrage" in an article he wrote as a first-year law student about Mississippi's law against interracial marriage. Setting aside the fact that as a student Mr. Pickering was supposed to be presenting a neutral analysis of the law, if the new standard for judicial confirmation is to have perfect judgment at the age of 21, the nation will soon be bereft of judges. The real Pickering record on race was reported on these pages yesterday by James Charles Evers, brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. He outlined Judge Pickering's courageous personal history on race, including taking a stand against the imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in 1967, an action that cost him his re-election as county prosecutor. Another Neas attack line is to portray him as a religious proselyte, not to say bigot. He scores the judge, a devout Baptist, for telling one defendant during a sentencing that "You can become involved in Chuck Colson's prison ministry or some other such ministry and be a benefit to your fellow inmates." Sounds like good, compassionate advice to us. Mr. Neas's paper also condemns Judge Pickering for the sin of not publishing many of his judicial decisions. He neglects to mention that there is no requirement for district judges to publish their rulings, which are usually delivered orally. Some judges do so anyway, by sending in transcripts to Westlaw or Lexis; circuit court judges, who understand that lower court rulings are rarely significant doctrinally, jokingly call this the "vanity press." In other words, Judge Pickering is not hiding anything; he's simply a modest man, a concept apparently beyond Mr. Neas's experience. In one political sense, of course, Mr. Pickering should consider himself fortunate. At least he's had a hearing, and he'll probably get a vote too, with Mr. Neas granting both because he figures he has the votes to bury him in committee. But of the 23 circuit court nominations pending before the Judiciary Committee, 21 have received no hearing at all. This includes every one of Mr. Bush's nominees for the half-empty Sixth Circuit. Mr. Leahy keeps sending us letters telling us that he's a fair man, he's not stalling anything, we've got him all wrong. But he's blown away even the pretense of fairness by making the first big political hearing of 2002 his assault on Mr. Pickering. And all of this merely to defeat a circuit court nominee. Imagine the venom that will be on display the first time there's a Supreme Court vacancy. In his hearing yesterday, Judge Pickering offered a dignified statement of his judicial philosophy: "I recognize and know the difference between a personal opinion or view, a political position or view and a judicial opinion. I will obey the Constitution." Too bad that's not a Constitution that Chairman Neas and his Democratic followers even recognize. opinionjournal.com

To: gao seng who wrote (226369)	2/9/2002 2:34:39 PM
From: CYBERKEN	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

<<?The sexual orientation of John Walker?s parents, like their liberal politics and their tolerant attitude toward child-rearing, did not cause Walker to join the Taliban.?>> Naaaahhh!! He probably got cold fries at McDonald's one day, and that was that...