BROWN V. BD. OF DEMS:

Brown is Worth Fighting For (Marni Soupcoff, 10/20/03, The American Enterprise)

Janice Brown is perhaps best known, however, for her principled insistence on the government’s equal treatment of its citizens, regardless of race. In her majority opinion in Hi-Voltage Wireworks v. City of San Jose, Brown upheld California’s notorious Proposition 209—a ballot initiative that banned government racial preferences—and struck down a San Jose ordinance requiring government contractors to seek bids from companies owned by women and minorities. Brown concluded that “equality of individual opportunity”—not affirmative action—is what the Constitution requires.

And one has to conclude that Brown, a black sharecropper’s daughter who worked her way up from a childhood in the segregated south to a position on the highest court of the country’s largest state, knows whereof she speaks.

Now, President Bush has nominated Brown to a seat on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, and her confirmation hearing is rapidly approaching. But liberal activists are trying vehemently to block her nomination, no doubt well aware that if Brown is elevated to a federal appeals court, she has an excellent chance at eventually landing a spot on the United States Supreme Court. This would be a serious blow to liberal special-interest groups—such as People for the American Way, one of Brown’s most vocal detractors. A Brown seat on the Supreme Court would mean one more vote for a jurisprudence of true equal rights, rather than one of forced racial and sex preferences. What poetic justice this vote for freedom would be, coming as it would from an articulate black female jurist.

It’s almost too much for the racial preferences crowd to bear, which explains their ongoing efforts to keep Brown off the DC Court of Appeals and the momentous fight they are waging to scuttle her nomination. But if any judicial nominee is worth fighting for, it is Janice Rogers Brown. [...]

If you would like to help support Justice Brown’s nomination, make your views known to your senators (http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm).

Democrats have to block the courthouse door with the ferocity of a George Wallace on this one, because they can't afford to have a black woman on the Supreme Court fast track.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 30, 2003 12:15 AM