ORDINARY EXTREMIST:

Latest Confirmed Nominee Sees Slavery in Liberalism (DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, 6/09/05, NY Times)

Janice Rogers Brown, the African-American daughter of Alabama sharecroppers who was confirmed Wednesday to the federal appeals court here, often invokes slavery in describing what she sees as the perils of liberalism.

"In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery," she has warned in speeches. Society and the courts have turned away from the founders' emphasis on personal responsibility, she has argued, toward a culture of government regulation and dependency that threatens fundamental freedoms.

"We no longer find slavery abhorrent," she told the conservative Federalist Society a few years ago. "We embrace it." She explained in another speech, "If we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of government, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression."

To her critics, such remarks are evidence of extremism. This week, some Senate Democrats have even singled her out as the most objectionable of President Bush's more than 200 judicial nominees, citing her criticism of affirmative action and abortion rights but most of all her sweeping denunciations of New Deal legal precedents that enabled many federal regulations and social programs - developments she has called "the triumph of our socialist revolution."

But the Senate determined yesterday that the President's most extreme and objectionable nominee does bnot rise to the level of "extraordinary" that would make a filibuster legitimate.

MORE:
Senate Approves Brown: The California justice is confirmed to the D.C. appeals court after nearly two years. Schwarzenegger will pick her replacement. (Maura Reynolds, June 9, 2005, LA Times)

The Senate voted Wednesday to confirm California jurist Janice Rogers Brown to a seat on the powerful U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, a position that could place her on President Bush's short list of potential Supreme Court nominees. [...]

The confirmation process for Brown, a justice on the California Supreme Court, stretched over nearly two years and came to symbolize two fiercely opposing forces in Washington: the president's determination to curb what conservatives see as the federal judiciary's intrusion into social issues and the Democrats' determination to resist him.

Bush praised the Senate vote in a brief statement, describing Brown as "a brilliant and fair-minded jurist who is committed to the rule of law." Brown, the first African American woman to sit on the state Supreme Court, will become the second to sit on the D.C. circuit court.

California's two senators — Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats — opposed Brown's elevation to the federal bench. Before Bush came to office, the Senate traditionally considered opposition by home-state senators sufficient to block a nominee.

"This may be the first such Senate confirmation over the opposition of both home-state senators in the history of the United States Senate," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

When two "fiercely opposing forces" meet and one wins utterly you have to be a bitter-ender to see it as a loss.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 9, 2005 9:38 AM