Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.
Which comes from Donna Ladd’s take-no-prisoners jeremiad against the very idea of nominating Charles W. Pickering, Sr., to the Fifth Circuit Court. “Apologists are actually giving a would-be circuit judge an ovation for once prosecuting the low-life scum of the KKK,” she wrote, holding up to the light one of Pickering’s strongest claims to having reconstructed himself. —This was written, mind you, back before Lott stuck his foot in his mouth and got demoted from Senate Majority Leader to chair the Senate Rules Committee; back before Frist, Lott’s replacement as Majority Leader, vowed to turn the Lott imbroglio into “a catalyst for unity and a catalyst for positive change.”
Well, Bush has just handed him a doozy of a test for those catalysts. —It’s time to dust off the Case Against Pickering, again:
Judge Pickering’s opinions on the bench also raise questions about his commitment to fairness and to the federal courts’ historic role as dispenser of equal justice. Many of his civil rights opinions betray an indifference, and even outright hostility, toward those seeking to remedy perceived injustice. Judge Pickering displays a tendency to inject his personal opinions and biases about the state of the law, the losing plaintiffs, or judges in other cases, raising serious questions about whether he is ruling based on personal views or on the dictates of the law. He has also acted in other ways that call into question his commitment to fairness, including refusing to appoint another judge to decide whether he should be recused when a party alleged that he had a personal bias and threatening or imposing sanctions in cases in which sanctions did not appear to be warranted. He has been reversed by the 5th Circuit Court over decisions in which he not only failed to follow controlling legal precedent, but failed even to mention it.
Set aside for the moment the question of his commitment to civil rights, if you like; refuse to contemplate his past actions, papers written in law school, his support for the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee. Forget that the Fifth Circuit has the highest minority population by percentage of any circuit in the country, yet only one black judge and two Hispanic judges. (We are, after all, a color-blind society, with no need for such corrective action.) Forget the whole Trent Lott deal; he was an isolated case, and anyway, John Ashcroft is still Attorney General. Forget all of this and ask yourself the big question, you know, the one on merit:
Is this man even competent to ride the Fifth Circuit?
The Free Congress Foundation says yes, on the basis of three of over a thousand decisions—and writes off Pickering’s paper used to strengthen enforcement of Mississippi’s anti-miscegenation laws as “an academic treatise on a legal question” and support and even use of the Mississippi Sovereignty Committee as a vote between sealing or burning the Committee’s records.
Federal judgeships aren’t consolation prizes for a few years of decent behavior.
The questions to ask yourself, now; is the appalling hubris of renominating Pickering to better grease the skids for the renomination of Priscilla “Enron” Owens? Are both nominations designed to draw attention away from the unabashed looting that’s the centerpiece of the Bush plan for “economic recovery”? Is the whole mess nothing more than a contrived bundle of awfulness to distract us from North Korea? Why hasn’t Tom Ridge declared a mauve alert yet? And how much more cynical do we have to get to keep up?
Commenting is closed for this article.
