SI
SI
discoversearch

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


To: epicure who wrote (332054)12/21/2002 1:33:27 AM
From: Skywatcher  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 769670
 
And who gives a crap?
Did he do his job or not?
OF COURSE and man was not meant to be hounded for every detail of his or her private life.....you are elected to represent the people and the Constitution....and to protect us......moreover from OURselves in regard to civil liberties and freedom.....
yet all THIS president can say is it's a sad day? according to whom?.....
CC



To: epicure who wrote (332054)12/21/2002 2:23:35 PM
From: Skywatcher  Respond to of 769670
 
EDITORIAL
After Lott, Bush's Challenge
Trent Lott's political free-fall ended with a thud Friday
when the disgraced and chastened Mississippian
agreed to resign the post of Senate majority leader.
Lott's Republican colleagues ultimately shoved the
senator aside to staunch the damage he was doing to
the party, despite his ever-more-desperate apologies
for waxing nostalgic about racial segregation at Sen.
Strom Thurmond's (R-S.C.) 100th birthday party and
in earlier statements.

But Lott's announcement presents an even bigger
challenge -- or opportunity -- to President Bush and
his supporters in the Senate, who pitch themselves as
compassionate conservatives and inclusive big-tenters
but who too often have pursued a different agenda on
civil rights.

Few politicians or judges are as blunt or voluble as
Lott on civil rights issues. But for the last two years, the
president's nominees to federal appeals courts have
tended toward lower-court judges whose records
display a striking antipathy to workers and minorities,
disguised in the carefully groomed language of states'
rights.

U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering of
Mississippi was one, a Lott friend whose bona fides as
a segregationist pushed the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject him for an
appellate seat this year. Bush had vowed to renominate Pickering for what
looked like certain confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate. With Lott
disgraced, Pickering may become too hot a political potato for the president.

Bush still stands solidly behind other nominees to appellate courts who lack
Pickering's blatant record on segregation but have made their names by resisting
this nation's commitment to equal opportunity: Los Angeles Superior Court
Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who argued in 1981 that racially discriminatory Bob Jones
University should be allowed to keep its tax-exempt status; Jeffrey Sutton for his
antipathy to federal protections for state workers; U.S. District Judge Terrence
W. Boyle of North Carolina, a former staffer to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and
twice overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down minority voting
districts; and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, whose undisguised
activism on the bench against abortion rights drew fire even from one of Bush's
top counselors.


Lott's disgrace gives the White House and Senate an opportunity to go deaf to
aging former Dixiecrats and their debt to a racist past. Bush, who appropriately
called segregation "unfaithful to our founding ideals," can further distance himself
from the old double standard by nominating centrists to the bench.

He also could offer the most contentious nominees the opportunity to withdraw.
That would save the Senate's new leaders from having to defend would-be
federal judges who are exclusionary, if more subtle than Lott.

CC