| Senate Democrats have been restrained in restricting Bush's extremist judicial nominees from the federal bench. |
| "The president got 10 judges blocked out of 214. Is that obstructionist? [Seven have been resubmitted since the 2004 election.] The Republicans…when they had control of the Senate…blocked 61 [Clinton appointed] judges." "The bottom line is the judges we have blocked want to turn the clock back…they don't want [a] narrow interpretation of the law. Their view of a narrow interpretation of the law is to turn the clock back to the 1890s." "One of the judges that they nominated said, 'Gods gift to white people was slavery.' A judge they nominated said, 'The purpose of a [woman] is to be subjugated to a [man].' We blocked those two. A judge they nominated said, 'There should be no zoning laws.' If someone wanted to build a factory right next to your home…that’s a taking of property. And the final one said, 'There should be no labor laws.' No minimum wage, no wages and hours, no worker protection laws, because those were all takings…unconstitutional takings." "The people we have blocked are extremists and if they were to go forward, the America we know, the changes we have made to make America a more fair and humane place would be gone, and we'd go back to the 1890s where those who had the power got their way completely. They can't do it in the congress. They can't even do it when they elect a president. So they're trying in the courts. It's our job to block them." Source: "Rep. Charles Schumer D-NY on PBS News Hour - 2/15/05 One of these prizes is William G. Myers III, nominated for a lifetime seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. His qualifications consist of having spent most of his adult life as a lobbyist for Western mining, timber and oil companies. Bush named him top lawyer in the Interior Department in 2001, apparently on the grounds that Myers once compared the federal government's management of federal lands to the tyranny of King George III. Another gem is Janice Rogers Brown of California, nominated for the D.C. Court of Appeals, who described the New Deal as "the triumph of our socialist revolution" and praised an infamous line of Supreme Court cases from 1905 to 1937 striking down worker health and safety laws as infringing on the rights of business. (Of course your employer has a right to kill you -- what are you, out of the mainstream?) Still another prize in this package is Claude A. Allen, who believes abortion rights are causing genocide of black people. A supporter of abstinence education, Allen backed the administration's decision to remove information about condoms from the Web site of the Centers for Disease Control. My personal fave is Priscilla Owen of the Texas Supreme Court, who is so far out that Alberto Gonzales once denounced one of her decisions as "an unconscionable act of judicial activism." Then there's William Haynes, principal author and defender of the administration's dubious handling of several torture issues. All in all, a lovely bunch of coconuts, with a collective record showing opposition to human rights, civil rights, abortion rights -- pretty much everything but property rights. Source: "Giving Bush's renominees the Byrd" by Molly Ivins - Creators Syndicate - 03.08.05 [Karl] Rove, who had helped select [Priscilla Owen] as the Republican candidate [for Texas Supreme Court Justice] helped raise more than $926,000 for her campaign, almost half from lawyers and others who had business before the court, according to Texans for Public Justice, a liberal group in Austin that tracks Texas campaign donations. Mr. Rove's firm was paid some $247,000 in fees. Justice Owen was …criticized at her first confirmation hearing by senators who said she took a year and a half to issue an opinion that involved a young man injured in a truck accident. The man, who was on a respirator, died when the family could not afford nursing care because the appeal delayed the multimillion-dollar verdict. Source: "Rove Guided Career of Judicial Nominee in Filibuster Fight" - by Neil A. Lewis - New York Times - 5/16/05 [Janice Rogers] Brown considers protections like the minimum wage and food safety standards as unconstitutional intrusions on commerce, and attacked the New Deal as "the triumph of our own socialist revolution." She'll now be able to protect us from legal protection from her seat on the second highest court in the land. Yet not a single Republican voted against her. In a dissent from her largely Republican colleagues on the Texas Supreme Court, Priscilla Owens supported a law that allowed certain private landowners to exempt themselves from "any environmental regulations" inconsistent with their own land use and water quality plans. She also argued for such draconian limits on the ability of minors seeking abortions to get permission from a judge that her then-colleague Alberto Gonzales said accepting her logic "would be an unconscionable act of judicial activism." Pryor defended Alabama's practice of handcuffing prisoners to a hitching post under the hot sun if they refused to work on chain gangs, and urged the Supreme Court to hold that a disabled state employee who has been discriminated against in the workplace cannot sue the state for damages under the Americans with Disabilities Act. Source: "Extraordinarily rancid justice" by Paul Loeb - WorkingForChange- 6/13/05 The proposal by some Republican senators to change rules that have governed the Senate for two centuries now puts [the system to prevent abuse of power and to protect our rights and freedoms] in danger. Since 1789, the Senate has rejected nearly 20 percent of all nominees to the Supreme Court, many without an up-or-down vote. In 1968 Republican senators used a filibuster to block voting on President Lyndon B. Johnson's nominee for chief justice of the Supreme Court. During the debate, a Republican senator, Robert Griffin, said: "It is important to realize that it has not been unusual for the Senate to indicate its lack of approval for a nomination by just making sure that it never came to a vote on the merits. As I said, 21 nominations to the court have failed to win Senate approval. But only nine of that number were rejected on a direct, up-and-down vote." Between 1968 and 2001, both parties used filibusters to oppose judicial nominees. In 2000, the last year of Bill Clinton's presidency, Republican senators filibustered two of his nominees to be circuit judges. They also prevented Senate votes on more than 60 of Mr. Clinton's judicial nominees by other means. So much for the assertion that filibustering to prevent votes on judicial nominees is a new tactic invented by Senate Democrats. During my six years as majority leader of the Senate, Republicans, then in the minority, often used filibusters to achieve their goals. I didn't like the results, but I accepted them because Republicans were acting within the rules; and we were able to work together on many other issues. There were 55 Democratic senators then. We had the power to take the drastic action now being proposed, but we refrained from exercising that power because it was as wrong then as it is now. Source: "The Not-So-Secret History of Filibusters" by GEORGE J. MITCHELL (former Democratic Senate majority leader) - New York Times - May 10, 2005 |
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