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Jewish World Review May 20, 2005 / 11 Iyar, 5765 Dangerous women By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Priscilla Owen, 50, is one of the more talented women of her
generation. She finished third in her class at Baylor Law School.
She had the best score in the state on the Texas bar exam when she
took it in 1977. Her performance as a judge on the Texas Supreme
Court has earned her the highest rating from the American Bar
Association. It's the sort of career that liberals promoting the
advancement of women should swoon over. But Senate Democrats are
blocking her nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because
she is supposedly too conservative, but because she is too female.
White guys who are as or more conservative than Owen have been
confirmed as appellate judges, while her nomination has languished
for four years. So it goes in the judicial wars. A woman. A black. A
Catholic. A Hispanic. It sounds like the beginning of a bad ethnic
joke, but it's the lineup of the Democrats' top filibuster victims.
If the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were reviewing
the Democrats' filibuster choices, it would have grounds for a
disparate-impact lawsuit. The over-representation of minorities and
women — especially if you put aside nominees from Michigan who have
been targeted in a spat dating back to the Clinton years — is not a
coincidence. Democrats fear that a non-Protestant, nonwhite nonmale
might be easier for President Bush to elevate to the Supreme Court
from a federal appeals court, so they want to keep nominees with the
"wrong" demographics from getting on an appeals court in the first
place. Consider Miguel Estrada, or as some Democrats think of him,
"the dangerous Latino."
A Democratic Senate aide wrote in 2001 that liberal groups were
especially keen to block Estrada. They consider him, the aide wrote,
"especially dangerous because he had a minimal paper trail, he is
Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme
Court appointment." Peter Beinart, editor of the liberal New
Republic magazine, agreed that it was important to block the
"Honduran immigrant" for the same reason. Estrada withdrew his
nomination in 2003.
This doesn't make Democrats racist, sexist or any other -ist.
And they are correct in their political reasoning. Republicans have
played demographic politics to help get conservatives on the Supreme
Court, namely Antonin Scalia (Italian-American) and Clarence Thomas
(African-American). But that doesn't make the Dems' racial and
gender profiling any less awkward. In the filibuster fight,
Democrats invoke minority rights. What they are attempting to
vindicate is the right of the Senate minority to block minorities.
Because Democrats have used unprecedented judicial filibusters
to block the nominees, they have had to apply red-hot rhetoric to
justify themselves. Priscilla Owen might have been a garden-variety
conservative if she had a Y chromosome, but as a woman she is deemed
an "extremist" undeserving of an up-or-down vote on the Senate
floor. The evidence adduced to support this charge is primarily her
decisions on the Texas Supreme Court in cases involving the state's
parental-notification statute. She ruled with the majority in nine
out of 12 such cases, hardly a sign of runaway judicial extremism.
When it comes to Owen, Brown or presumably other compelling
conservative women appellate nominees, Democrats have a simple
message: "You've come a long way, baby. Go no further."
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
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