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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (159108)	1/28/2003 1:21:04 PM
From: i-node	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1580597

Sorry........Pickering got their second highest rating....a little unusual for a judge being recommended for a federal position. You're wrong. The ABA's "Well Qualified" rating is the highest possible (I recommend you go to google an enter "ABA WELL QUALIFIED PICKERING" and you should get the message). However, you are correct about one thing -- Pickering wasn't the first time in history this outrageous behavior on the part of the Senate committee was done. In fact, it was the Owens nomination, an even worse abomination: cafes.net September 10, 2002 So Much For The Gold Standard Jeff Harwell Last year, when the Bush administration announced that it would no longer use the American Bar Association's evaluation of candidates for the federal judiciary, leading Democrats in the senate were outraged. How dare the president - who wasn't even a lawyer himself - presume to set aside the ABA's expert evaluation, that Democrat Senator Patrick Leahy referred to as the "gold-standard" when it came to picking federal judges? There is little doubt that the Democrats had no confidence in the president's ability to pick qualified judges. Well, as it turns out, the president has no trouble picking qualified judges, as the ABA unanimously rated Priscilla Owen as being "Well Qualified" for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals - the highest rating the association gives to candidates. In other words, it's not President Bush who is having a hard time picking qualified people, it's the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee (all of whom are lawyers). By a 10-9 vote, strictly along party lines, Ms. Owen's nomination was defeated in committee, denying the full Senate the opportunity to vote on her nomination, even though it is almost certain that she would have been confirmed if the Senate had been allowed to vote on her (Democrat Zell Miller of Georgia had announced his support for her). Think about that. The full Senate was apparently prepared to confirm Ms. Owen, but ten Democrat Senators were able to prevent that from happening. In so doing, they further demonstrated the contempt for the Constitution - when it stands in the way of their agenda - that has become one of the hallmarks of the national Democrat leadership. After all, it is the Senate that is supposed to have authority to confirm or deny appointments. No constitutional authority is given to a committee, any committee to hold up an appointment if the Senate as a whole is ready to confirm. And, by the way, this is the second time this has happened this year, as Charles' Pickering's nomination to the same fifth circuit was also defeated along a party line vote, while the senate as a whole was prepared to confirm. What had not happened before, ever, was for a nominee of Ms. Owen's caliber being voted down. You see, this marked the first time in history that a person with a unanimous "well-qualified" rating from the ABA was voted down. How do you explain this debacle? Simple. It happened because the very Democrat hypocrites who voted her down while complaining that she was out of the mainstream are actually out of the mainstream themselves. Think about it. If a majority of the Senate is ready to give her the job, isn't it those in the minority, who opposed her, who are actually out of the mainstream? Also, the major decisions she issued that were issues in her confirmation hearings were decisions that the American public generally agrees with. It seems that the Democrat leadership has purposefully loaded the Judiciary Committee with extremist left-wing ideologues rather than Senators who are in the mainstream of American thought. Until this problem of the makeup of the committee is solved, we will continue to see this power grab attempted by the senate over the judiciary. It is unlikely to be solved as long as the Democrats are in the majority. The logical answer to this problem is for the people of the United States to give control of the Senate back to the Republicans this November. Back to Rebuttal Home Page