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Politics : WHO IS RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT IN 2004 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: calgal who wrote (807)	1/11/2003 12:47:19 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10965

REVIEW & OUTLOOK Playing the Lott Card "Strom" Schumer gets ready to smear Judge Pickering. Friday, January 10, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110002887 Call it wishful thinking, but we had hoped that GOP control of the Senate meant that we would finally get to stop writing about judicial politics. We hadn't counted on Senator Chuck Schumer. The New York Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee has started the New Year with a harangue, playing the race card and vowing to filibuster the nomination of Charles Pickering Sr., whom President Bush renominated Tuesday to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Schumer's threat came just two days after Ralph Neas of People for the American Way released a memo urging Democrats to filibuster President Bush's judicial nominees. To understand what's going on here, merely listen to Mr. Schumer's remarks: "To renominate Judge Pickering, who has not built a distinguished record and is probably best known for intervening on behalf of a convicted cross-burner, shows unfortunately that Richard Nixon's Southern strategy is still alive and well in the White House." The Schumer Democrats are playing the Trent Lott card, trying to take advantage of the former GOP Senate leader's fall by smearing Judge Pickering as racist in order to smear Republicans as anti-black. This race-baiting is all the more offensive because it is demonstrably false about Judge Pickering's career and a gross distortion of the 1995 case called U.S. v. Swan over which the judge presided. That case concerned three young white men who burned a cross in the yard of a mixed-race couple. If Mr. Schumer has a complaint it should be with the Clinton Justice Department, which was relaxed enough about the crime to offer the defendants plea bargains. Two--the ring-leader, who was a juvenile, and a low-IQ adult--accepted the offers and served no prison time. The third defendant, Daniel Swan, rejected a deal that would have meant a year and a half in jail and decided to take his chances with a trial. He was convicted and, under the mandatory sentencing guidelines, received five to seven-and-a-half years. Judge Pickering got Swan's sentence reduced on the grounds that it was disproportionate to the other sentences and because Swan had no history of racial animus. Swan isn't the only defendant whom Judge Pickering has helped in this manner. He also granted a reduction in sentence to a 20-year-old black man convicted of a first-time drug offense. The man's lawyer said his client's "sentencing experience" with Judge Pickering was "a positive life-changing experience." Judge Pickering's whole life story, not just his experience on the bench, suggests that he has repeatedly gone out of his way to help African-Americans. Or, as he put it last year, "I helped integrate our schools, the dinner table, my political party, my fraternity, and my church." In the 1960s, he sent his children to the newly integrated Mississippi public schools even though there was an all-white private school nearby. As county attorney from 1964-68 he helped the FBI prosecute Ku Klux Klansmen, including testifying against the Imperial Wizard, and was defeated for re-election because of it. In 1971, he ran for the state Senate and won with the support of two-thirds of the black voters in his district. He also has a long record of helping advance civil rights causes in Mississippi, getting white banks to lend money to black businesses and helping get federal funds directed to programs that helped African-Americans. Former Democratic Governor William Winter says Judge Pickering has been "one of this state's most dedicated and effective voices for breaking down racial barriers." African-American leaders in his hometown of Laurel, Mississippi, overwhelmingly support him. Mr. Schumer knows all of this, but none of it matters because his agenda is to stir up the black vote against Republicans going into 2004. With the Lott debacle fresh in everyone's minds, now is the time to pile on, especially since Mr. Pickering is a Lott friend from Mississippi. Never mind that Mr. Bush and fellow Republicans were the folks who sent Mr. Lott to the backbenches. Democrats defeated Mr. Pickering the first time on a 10-9 party-line vote in Judiciary, even though they know he would have won on the floor. Now that they are in the minority, they are threatening a filibuster strategy that would take judicial politics to a whole new level of enmity. Since 1949, a study by the Congressional Research Service shows the only successful filibuster against a judge was in 1968, when Strom Thurmond used it against Abe Fortas, LBJ's nominee for Supreme Court Chief Justice. Call him Strom Schumer.