President Bush refuses to compromise
so much as one inch on his nominees for the
federal appeals courts. Rather than working with Senate Democrats to find judges whose experience and moderation would appease both sides of the aisle, as did the more than 200 Bush nominees who have already been confirmed, Bush has decided to continue to engage in divisive partisan politics by resubmitting 12 already rejected
nominees. He didn’t even have the common courtesy to find new radical conservatives completely unqualified to be on the bench. How rude.
Ideologues like to play dress up these days: Some dress up like journalists and take money from the government; Bush’s 12 nominees are ideologues dressed up in black gowns. They were rejected or obstructed due to serious concerns about their capacity to fairly adjudicate the law. The Democrats were right to use everything in their power to oppose these lifetime appointments, and they should continue to do so. Nothing short of our future liberties are at stake.
Here are two examples, using information compiled by the People for the American Way:
Priscilla Owen, re-nominated to the Fifth
Circuit, has been criticized by her then-Texas Supreme Court colleague and current U.S.
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for several of her dissents, who called one an “unconscionable act of judicial activism” and described another as “nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric … based on a flawed premise.” When the man who found justifications for U.S. torture calls your actions “unconscionable,” you know you have a problem. Owen is rabidly anti-worker and anti-consumer, consistently ruling for corporate interests in cases involving civil rights, worker compensation and environmental violations.
William Pryor, re-nominated to the Eleventh Circuit, has argued that it is constitutional to
arrest gays and lesbians if they are sexually
active. He is also a crusader against abortion,
calling Roe v. Wade “the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.”
We had hoped that President Bush would
use his precious “political capital,” which he claims to have earned after the last election, to heal divisions in this country and spread a
bipartisan ethic in Congress. But he apparently
has sold whatever soul he once had to the evangelical community who will stop at nothing to
use the courts to roll back social progress.
With the threat of Senate Republicans
dismantling filibustering, using the so-called
“nuclear option” to force votes on these nominees, and with the very real possibility of a Supreme Court vacancy in the next few years, this is the most significant threat facing liberals today. It is incumbent for Democrats and moderate conservatives to take a stand here and now, no matter what the consequences.

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