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Guest Commentary March 8, 2002
A Shameless Smear
The Honorable Jon Kyl
Charles Pickering, 64, is a grandfather, a dad to a current member of Congress, and a U.S. District Court judge. When President Bush nominated Judge Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals last year, the selection was thought so uncontroversial that his confirmation would be a relative formality.
Charles Pickering was rated "well-qualified" to serve on the Court by the American Bar Association - which provides the measuring stick Democrats insist on using to evaluate judicial nominees. And he was confirmed to his current position on the federal district court in 1990 without even a single vote of opposition in the United States Senate.
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Yet, as I write this, all 10 Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee are united in staunch opposition to Pickering's selection. Unless one of those 10 agrees to allow the full Senate to vote on the judge, his nomination is effectively dead.
The reason for this is sad and simple: Charles Pickering is a good man under savage attack because he is -- a conservative. Senator Dianne Feinstein recently admitted as much, telling reporters she would oppose Pickering because he would "skew the courts to the right."
Yet, recognizing that a conservative President generally will appoint conservative judges, most Senate Democrats need to find additional reasons to vote against President Bush's nominees. So they resort to brutal and misleading character attacks to destroy a person's reputation. Just Pickering's case is just the latest example.
They argue, for instance, that Pickering behaved improperly as a federal judge, pointing to an incident in 1995, when the judge allegedly contacted an official in the Clinton Justice Department about the sentencing guidelines applicable to a young man convicted in a cross burning case. Senator John Edwards of North Carolina inferred that the phone call was a violation of judicial ethics.
But the Clinton official Edwards referenced has little recollection of such a call. He extols Judge Pickering as "a person of great integrity," adding "I think it most regrettable that his nomination has become controversial."
Lest anyone think this official might be trying to help the Bush administration by defending one of the President's nominees, I want to tell you the official's name. It is Frank Hunger, a staunch Democrat and the brother-in-law of former Vice President Al Gore.
By far, the most scurrilous attack on Pickering is that he is "racially insensitive." Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle recently stated that Pickering appears "incapable of enforcing civil rights laws."
Yet Pickering's opponents ignore the fact that as a county attorney, Pickering helped prosecute Ku Klux Klansmen in Mississippi, a factor that heavily contributed to his defeat for re-election. Or that he worked to get white-owned banks to lend money to minority-owned businesses and to get federal funds for after-school and medical programs for minorities. Or that civil rights leaders in his hometown overwhelmingly support Pickering, refuting charges that he's prejudiced.
"He was standing up for blacks in Mississippi when no other white man would," says Charles Evers, the brother of slain Mississippi civil rights leader Medgar Evers.
In short, Democrats are content to brand a courageous public servant as racist because they don't like his political views. That is not what the Constitution contemplates in giving the Senate the power to "advise and consent" on judicial nominations.
On rare occasions, I voted against Clinton nominees who I felt were too biased by their own views to rule fairly from the bench. But that was the rare exception, not the rule. In fact, Republicans controlled the Senate for the majority of both Presidents Reagan and Clinton's terms, and the number of federal judges confirmed under both administrations is nearly identical.
Indeed, in past administrations, judicial confirmations were mostly routine affairs, not the savage, knock-down, drag-out battles they have now become. Until we restore some sanity to this process, the climate in Washington will get uglier, while good people like Charles Pickering are discarded in the gutter of all-out partisan warfare.
That isn't right.
Jon Kyl, a Republican, is a U.S. Senator from Arizona. The above commentary has been adapted from a weekly column Sen. Kyl issues, March 8, 2002. To contact him, Click Here.
The above column has been distributed by PoliticsOL.com.
