Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (3183)	3/11/2002 12:52:27 AM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Throw back the throwback Pickering March 5, 2002, 7:27PM By CRAGG HINES Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle A few judicial nominees deserve to be Borked, and Charles W. Pickering Sr. is one. If Pickering were just a throwback to the worst days of Jim Crow, it would be one thing, but as recently as 1994, he argued that prosecutors should go easy on a man convicted of burning a cross on the lawn of an interracial couple and shooting into their house. The worst part is that Pickering made his argument, in secret entreaties to the Justice Department, as the U.S. district judge in Mississippi hearing the case. Pickering is clearly not qualified for his current judicial post. Now, President Bush has nominated Pickering for elevation to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. A closely divided Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Pickering's nomination tomorrow. The committee should reject it, and the few moderate Republicans on the panel should join in sending the White House a message that this kind of judicial foolishness will not be tolerated. Pickering may be defeated, but don't wait for any Republicans to hop aboard. Pickering's major qualification is that he is a close friend of Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. Lott tried to rush Pickering's nomination through, and the Democrats who control the Senate Judiciary Committee initially sought to accommodate the Republican leader. A hearing was held on Oct. 18, when Senate operations were virtually shut down by the threat of anthrax. Civil rights and abortion rights groups asked the committee to slow down the freight train. Researchers went to work on Pickering's record. Conservatives and Bush loyalists carp that this is what liberals did to Robert C. Bork, which resulted in rejection of his nomination, by President Reagan, to the Supreme Court in 1987. Well, yes, it is similar, and for good reason. Judicial nominees should at least be made to explain their records, both on and off the bench. Pickering has a lot of explaining to do and hasn't done a very good job of it, including at a second committee hearing on his nomination last month. To put Pickering's legal background in the best possible light, he is an evolved racist. As a student in 1959, Pickering authored a law review note on ways to strengthen Mississippi's law against interracial marriage, advice the Legislature quickly took. Pickering wasn't carrying out an assignment. He wasn't playing devil's advocate. He was a budding segregationist politician. Pickering soon formed a law firm with a Mississippi politician pledged to defending a segregated South. A voluntary association. In 1964, Pickering left the Democratic Party and became a Republican. At his second Senate committee hearing, Pickering said he made the move because the national Democratic Party had "humiliated" the Mississippi party. In the context of the 1960s, "humiliated" meant that the national Democratic Party had forced the Mississippi party to desegregate. Ancient history? It could be, but unfortunately is not. Pickering's more recent record is almost as bad. His district court opinions are sprinkled with truly anachronistic musings about settled law, including hostility to the principle of one person-one vote as a bother to state and local governmental processes. Pickering's pledge to follow precedent, including on abortion rights, rings hollow given his leadership in 1976 as a Republican National Convention delegate in inserting a call for an anti-abortion constitutional amendment into the party's platform. Some black activists have spoken up for Pickering, but his record speaks for itself. Supporters point to his appearance against a Ku Klux Klan defendant in a mid-1960s murder trial. That's admirable but hardly makes him The Great Emancipator, and, anyway, by then the Klan was an economic embarrassment to the white establishment. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush nominated Pickering for a district judgeship, and he was confirmed. In 1994, Pickering vividly illustrated why that was a mistake. It came in the cross-burning case. Justice Department records show Pickering protested, in a private session, the prosecution's effort to have the defendant sentenced to the five years called for in federal guidelines. Pickering also called a senior Justice Department official to complain and, according to department notes, threatened to grant a new trial. Pickering's actions seem a clear violation of judicial ethics. He's not fit for his current job, much less a promotion. chron.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (3183)	1/10/2003 2:18:21 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Payback in Judges " The worst-kept secret in Washington: Judicial appointments are the tribute Bush pays to his political base." By E. J. Dionne Jr. Friday, January 10, 2003; Page A21 washingtonpost.com You have to hand it to President Bush and his judge-pickers. They understand the power of the judiciary to shape American political life for years to come. They brazenly use their executive authority to fill the courts with their allies. Then they attack, attack and attack again when opposition senators dare invoke their own constitutional power to slow a juggernaut whose purpose is to remake the world according to the specifications of Justice Antonin Scalia. To make clear who is in charge, Bush took two circuit court nominees rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, when it was in Democratic hands, and sent them right back. The renominations of Justice Priscilla Owen of the Texas Supreme Court and, especially, of Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. of Mississippi caused consternation and even a bit of shock. Pickering had been the personal choice of former Senate Republican leader Trent Lott, who was pushed out of his job after his tribute to Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential candidacy. Pickering was hurt by his handling of the sentencing in a cross-burning case and his past views on civil rights. Republicans argue that the cross-burning issue was invoked unfairly, because Pickering was simply seeking equity in the sentencing of the case's three defendants. But Pickering's tendency to use court opinions for disquisitions on public issues suggested a less than judicial temperament. Politically, the renominations were shrewd. By sending Pickering up again, Bush signaled to his Southern backers that he was willing to stand up for a Mississippian against Senate liberals, despite Lott's defenestration. And the energy the Pickering and Owen battles will soak up may allow other ideological nominees to slip through. The real issue here involves not the personal characteristics of nominees -- there are plenty of smart conservatives on Bush's list -- but a political struggle to create an increasingly activist conservative bench. "They realized that if they took over the one unelected part of the government, they could govern for a generation," says Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat. A liberal fantasy? On the contrary, the ever-candid Clint Bolick, a former Reagan Justice Department official and conservative activist, told The Post this week that "everyone on the right agreed in 2000 that judicial nominations were the single most important reason to be for Bush." The worst-kept secret in Washington: Judicial appointments are the tribute Bush pays to his political base. Moreover, conservatives are increasingly willing to use federal judicial power to achieve political ends. Forget Florida 2000 and consider a redistricting controversy in Mississippi last year. It involved none other than Rep. Charles W. Pickering Jr., a Republican who is Judge Pickering's son. Mississippi lost a congressional seat after the 2000 Census, and Pickering's district was merged with that of Rep. Ronnie Shows, a Democrat. A state judge drew district lines favoring Shows. A federal three-judge panel, all Republican appointees, then drew a plan favoring Pickering. The judges said they would impose their plan if the Bush Justice Department did not quickly clear the state plan for civil rights purposes. By dragging its feet, the Justice Department sealed Shows's fate. The final blow came from none other than Justice Scalia -- a friend of the Pickering family who presided over the younger Pickering's first swearing-in as a congressman. Scalia ruled to allow the Republican judges to impose their map. Pickering beat Shows this fall. Or consider the ruling of Judge John D. Bates in December declaring that Congress's General Accounting Office -- and thus the public -- had no right to learn the specifics about meetings between Vice President Cheney's famous energy task force and various energy executives and lobbyists. The same John Bates, an appointee of the current president, was an attorney for Ken Starr's Whitewater investigation and pushed hard (and successfully) for the release of various White House documents related to Hillary Rodham Clinton's activities. "When that guy was working for Ken Starr, he wanted to go open the dresser drawers of the White House," said Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. "I guess it's a lot different when it's a Republican vice president." Such suspicions of partisanship in the judiciary are corrosive because, unfortunately, they are now plausible. Judicial appointments are not like patronage jobs in the Commerce Department. Judges sit for life. A president who says he wants a more decorous process won't get it if he refuses to acknowledge that the road to depoliticizing the judiciary will be paved by consultation on appointments. Playing partisan politics and calling it high principle won't work anymore. washingtonpost.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (3183)	1/10/2003 5:26:56 PM
From: Mephisto	Respond to of 15516

Arrogant Bush invites racial battle "…the last thing he needs at the start of a new Congress is a diversion onto a civil rights battleground, where his party is newly vulnerable in light of the new partisan wounds opened by the Lott affair." Jules Witcover sunspot.net Originally published Jan 10, 2003 WASHINGTON - It certainly didn't take President Bush long to indicate his response to the political problem created by Sen. Trent Lott's reminiscences about the good old days of segregation, now that Mr. Lott has been thrown to the wolves. Some civil rights advocates may have deluded themselves into expecting the president to be cowed by Democratic plans to put Republican race policies under a greater microscope now and thus back off his most controversial earlier judgeship nominations. They quickly found out otherwise as he greeted the new Congress with the renomination of Mr. Lott's Mississippi friend, Charles W. Pickering Sr., a federal district judge seeking to move up to the federal appellate court in New Orleans. Senate Democrats rejected Judge Pickering last year on the basis of his record on racial issues, particularly his early criticisms of race-mixing and associations with segregationist leaders in his state. Mr. Lott and other defenders insisted, however, that Judge Pickering's views and behavior had changed with the times. Even as Mr. Lott retreated in a gallop from his own record on race, trying to save his job as Senate Republican leader, he stuck by Judge Pickering in the interview on Black Entertainment Television, which contributed mightily to his own fall. Mr. Bush's effort to jam Judge Pickering down the throats of Senate Democrats - and that apparently is what it will take - sends a discouraging message not only to black voters but also to moderate Republicans who had hoped the Lott affair would be a wake-up call for their party about racial politics. These moderates saw in the fiasco a fresh opportunity to alter the party's image as the conservative white man's haven, clinging to the past to hold the Deep South as a dependable political base. Instead, the Pickering renomination is mobilizing Democratic leaders to fan even more aggressively the suspicions toward the GOP among black, liberal and other minority voters stirred anew by the Lott incident. Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, the one Democrat whom sons of the old South most love to hate, has already said, "We will use every tool in our arsenal to ensure that [Judge Pickering's] nomination is rejected again this year." That remark, echoed by fellow Democrat Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, suggests a possible filibuster, which the 51 Republicans in the Senate would find hard to break because they would need 60 votes. That Mr. Bush would openly invite such a fight on the very first day of the new Congress, and at the same time propose another massive program of $674 billion in tax breaks, mostly for the well-off, reveals a confidence that spills over into arrogance. While his party made gains in November that gave him control of both houses, they were minimal. And although it's true the Republicans have regained the chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will consider the nomination, House and Senate Democratic leaders, stung by their November defeat, are vowing greater confrontation this year. Mr. Bush's gesture to white conservatives with his in-your-face renomination of Judge Pickering is a president flexing his political muscles in the most conspicuous and defiant manner. But the last thing he needs at the start of a new Congress is a diversion onto a civil rights battleground, where his party is newly vulnerable in light of the new partisan wounds opened by the Lott affair. Mr. Lott himself is on the spot as a continuing member of the Senate. Which version will be serving from now on? Will it be the repentant Mr. Lott who now, among other things, says he completely supports affirmative action in education ? Or will it be the dug-in Mr. Lott who still stands four-square behind Judge Pickering? Mr. Lott on opening day sat docilely among the back rows of the Senate, away from the well of the chamber, where in his imperious manner he once directed the Senate's business as majority leader. Instead of resuming his position as GOP top dog, Mr. Lott will be closely watched to see whether he will now be a man of his new word, or of his old past. Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. His column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun