CONGRATULATIONS JUDGE BROWN

Judge Brown was confirmed 56-43. Thanks, Senator McCain, you're my hero.

MORE:
Liberals Rethinking Senate Filibuster Deal (Charles Babington June 8, 2005, Washington Post)

Democrats generally cheered, and Republicans groused, when a bipartisan group of senators crafted a compromise on judicial nominations last month. But with the Senate now confirming several conservative nominees whom Democrats had blocked for years, some liberals are questioning the wisdom of the deal and fretting about what comes next.

"Our problem with the compromise is the price that was paid," Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) said yesterday. She and other Congressional Black Caucus members plan to march into the Senate today to protest the impending confirmation of Janice Rogers Brown. [...]

"It looks like in some ways Frist is seizing the initiative," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond. Moreover, he said, liberals may be deluded in thinking the bipartisan deal will thwart another contentious nominee -- Brett M. Kavanaugh, the White House staff secretary -- who is not named in the two-page agreement. Two years ago, Bush nominated Kavanaugh, who helped independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr pursue the Monica S. Lewinsky case, to the D.C. Circuit appeals court.

"I think it's wishful thinking by the Democrats that he won't move forward," Tobias said. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) said of Kavanaugh in an interview yesterday, "I intend to push him."

Yesterday, the Senate devoted itself entirely to Brown. Frist called her "a superb judge" who applies the law "without bias, without favor, with an even hand." Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), one of the 14 negotiators, called Brown "an extremely talented and qualified judge" who will "advance the cause of conservative judicial philosophy."

But Democrats recited a litany of Brown's controversial statements, including several from a 2000 speech titled "Fifty Ways to Lose Your Freedom." She said senior citizens "blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much 'free' stuff as the political system will permit them to extract." Elsewhere, Brown has said: "Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates. . . . When government advances . . . freedom is imperiled, civilization itself [is] jeopardized."

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) told reporters that Brown is "one of the most extreme nominees that has ever come before the United States Senate in the 32 years I've been a senator."

And the Gang made her a federal judge.

Posted by David Cohen at June 8, 2005 5:29 PM