Posted on 02/17/2006 7:54:59 PM PST by new yorker 77
WHERE does he find these people? No sooner had President Bush returned last week from Coretta Scott King's funeral than he nominated to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals a lawyer with a terrible record on civil rights.
Bush, speaking at the service in Atlanta, rejoiced that because King and her murdered husband, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., had refused to be intimidated, "millions of children they would never meet are now living in a better, more welcoming country."
The next day, the White House announced Bush's nomination to the appeals court that hears federal cases from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi of a man who for much of his legal career has been on the opposite side of the civil rights fight from the Kings' ideals.
Bush sent to the Senate the name of Michael B. Wallace, a Jackson, Miss., attorney. He is a well-connected Republican and will almost certainly be confirmed. But it should not be without a hearings process that examines Wallace's history of antipathy toward making America the more welcoming society Bush spoke about.
Some highlights: Wallace, as an aide to then-House Republican Whip Trent Lott, D-Miss., in the early 1980s fought to protect the tax-exempt status of even the most notoriously segregationist institutions. That included Bob Jones University in South Carolina, where interracial dating was banned until 2000 — and even then required written consent of parents. Also with Lott, Wallace worked to require discriminatory intent — not effect — be proved in voting rights cases.
Later in the 1980s, as a member of the board of the Legal Services Corp., Wallace attempted to gut the agency. He voted to hire outside attorneys to lobby Congress to reduce its appropriation, an action prohibited by the law creating the LSC, as a bipartisan group of lawmakers pointed out.
As an attorney for the Mississippi Republican Party, Wallace fought so strongly for a white-friendly redistricting plan that a U.S. district court accused him of going beyond spirited representation to "needless multiplication of proceedings at great waste of both the court's and the parties' time and resources."
Great record, huh, for a man whom the president would give a lifetime post on a court that is an important fulcrum in civil rights litigation? As Elliot Mincberg, general counsel of People for the American Way, said after Wallace's nomination: "He's been around for quite awhile doing a lot of things that are bad for civil rights."
The Mississippi Conference of the NAACP moved quickly to voice "outrage" at Wallace's nomination. Like some of Bush's other 5th Circuit nominees, Wallace's extremism is cloaked in a solid educational background: B.A. from Harvard, J.D. from the University of Virginia Law School, where he was already displaying his strong ideological predilection.
When a constitutional law professor would ask what his class thought about various cases, it's said, he would exempt Wallace, noting that the class already knew what Wallace thought.
"He is one of those individuals who can intellectualize discrimination, which is the most dangerous sort of individual to this country," said Derrick Johnson, president of Mississippi's NAACP chapter.
Nominating Wallace was at least fittingly re-trograde, as he would take the 5th Circuit seat vacated by the retirement of Charles W. Pickering Sr., another Lott crony whose legal and political career was marked by playing footsie with ardent segregationists and their loathsome policies. Bush took the rare step of elevating Pickering from a U.S. district court judgeship to the 5th Circuit with a recess appointment after Senate Democrats twice blocked a formal nomination.
Wallace has been in the Republican pipeline a long time. Bush's father considered him for a 5th Circuit job in 1992. That prospect prompted a number of groups, including the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, to review Wallace's record.
In March 1992, Frank Parker, then director of the Lawyers' Committee's voting rights project, said that Wallace's conduct in the Mississippi redistricting case showed Wallace "lacks the integrity, judicial temperament and respect for legal proceedings necessary for appointment to the judicial bench."
The White House knows who Wallace is and what he represents.
Hoping to counter opposition such as the NAACP's, when the White House announced Wallace's nomination, it issued a list of people to vouch for him. The top two were Reuben Anderson and Fred Banks, African-Americans who are former justices on the Mississippi Supreme Court. What the White House did not say was that they both are currently members of the same law firm as Wallace.
Neither returned my calls.
The White House seems confident that Senate Democrats are so cowed that Bush can nominate virtually anyone to these important courts, no matter how egregious the record.
Hines is a Houston Chronicle columnist based in Washington, D.C. (cragg.hines@chron.com)
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HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com | Section: Cragg Hines This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/hines/3660230.html
"Cragg Hines is a Washington, D.C. based political opinion columnist. He is currently employed by the Houston Chronicle. Hines is generally regarded to write from a liberal political perspective.
"Hines has been employed at the Chronicle since 1972 and served as the paper's Washington bureau chief for almost two decades. He was previously a writer for United Press International.
"Hines is noted for his hard hitting and sometimes acerbic writing style."
--Wikepedia
All your judges are belonging to us.
Sounds like another home run for Bush.
It's got to bite to be a liberal these days.
Like a lot of conservatives, I'm often surprised to discover that I'm a racist, white, protestant male.
(It is a real shock to discover that I'm not white. I wonder what else those liberals have got wrong.)
I`m confused, what`s the problem with this appointment? Guy sounds pretty good to me.
Nothing at all wrong with it. That's why Bush has been good in spite of our disagreements with him. His judges are topnotch.
LOL
That brings back memories.
I'm beginning to like and respect this guy already. Laws that look at disparate effect and ignore intent are undemocratic abominations that are intended to assure specific, racially-mandated outcomes in total defiance of fairness and equal rights.
Good. The Legal Services Corporation was a taxpayer-funded leftist playground prior to the 1980s reforms. This guy knows that, he's just pathetically spinning to make things sound as bad as possible.
By the way, no Republican would be pushing a "white-friendly" redistricting plan in any state. One of the dirty little secrets of the Voting Rights Act is that the mandated majority-minority districts concentrate Democratic votes and lead to more Republican districts. Republicans always support the majority-minority redistricting proposals because it helps them a lot and hurts Dems. Hines is definitely lying about that one.
Bush totally rocks on Judges. He is even better than Reagan!!
What funeral? I remember only a race-baiting event ala NAACP.
He's really being put in the 5th now for OJT for the next SCOTUS vacancy.
Crimea River.
Hines is an Ultra Leftist and is one of the reasons I canceled my subscription of the Chronicle.
Wallace is a former law partner of mine. Simply a first class guy - honest, diligent, and hard-working, besides being brilliant. No wonder the Rats hate him.
I enlisted his background help on a case once for a client. The client then thought I was brilliant.
Craig Hines
http://tinyurl.com/99wb2
Hines was formerly a writer and editor for United Press International in Dallas, Little Rock and Austin. He has been designated a Congressional Fellow, a Ford Foundation-funded program of the American Political Science Association.
BTTT
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