Posted on 03/07/2002 6:53:09 PM PST by Lady In Blue
heraldsun.com: printer-friendly story [back]
CONFIRMATION PROCESS: Demeaning and malicious
March 6, 2002 3:31 pm
Why federal judge Charles Pickering willingly walked into a character-dicing buzz saw called Senate confirmation is a question only he can answer, but a man’s desire to get ahead in his profession is a noble ideal. What is happening to Pickering, however, is as base and malicious as it gets on Capitol Hill. North Carolina Sen. John Edwards bears much of the blame.
Pickering is a native of Mississippi, and he still lives there. He is a member of the crucial transitional generation of the 1950s that would do so much to move that bastion of racial segregation toward more enlightened thinking. Indeed, Mississippi today has more black elected officials than any other state. President Bush nominated Pickering, who is a Republican, for a seat on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. During the civil rights revolution, the Fifth Circuit was a powerful battering ram against segregation, and it remains well respected today for the high quality of its rulings.
But to hear outfits like People for the American Way and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond tell it, Pickering is the personification of “Fergit, hell!” Not quite. The skunk juice that Senate Democrats are throwing on Pickering has met resistance in the form of many black Mississippians who think he deserves to move up to the Fifth Circuit.
Sen. Edwards, a leader in the attempt to torpedo Pickering, has been too cagey to attack Pickering directly on racial issues. Instead, Edwards zeroed in on Pickering’s judicial ethics involving racial incidents. As a federal district judge hearing a case involving a cross-burning in an interracial couple’s front yard, Pickering became so frustrated with federal prosecutors that he called the Justice Department. The prosecutors wanted to put the cross-burner away for seven years, yet another man who fired a shot into the couple’s home would have been sentenced to house arrest.
Pickering gave the cross-burner 27 months. Disparity or not, civil rights groups latched onto the sentence as proof positive that Pickering was at heart an unreconstructed segregationist. Yet this is the same man who in 1967 endured threats of violence from the Ku Klux Klan in Laurel, Miss., his home. Pickering, then a county prosecutor in the vein of Atticus Finch, the heroic white lawyer in Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird,” had gone after Klan leaders involved in the fire-bombing death of black activist Vernon Dahmers in nearby Hattiesburg.
Of course, to those on the left who want to immolate Pickering, nothing he did in the quest for racial justice will ever be enough. Democrats control the Senate Judiciary Committee, and they almost certainly will vote against Pickering’s confirmation and for character assassination.
This time it is the Democrats doing the dirty work in a nomination. Republicans carry their share of shame for this sort of thing when they were in the catbird seat. It doesn’t matter which party throws the rope over a stout limb. The fact that both participate in such destructive orgies casts a ghastly pall over the nomination process and, by extension, representative government itself. URL for this article: http://www.herald-sun.com/opinion/hsedits/56-202640.html
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I am hoping we can follow the lead of the South Dakotans, and pass a law preventing a candidate from running for both offices at once.
CD
As they say on the radio here in Raleigh, we don't have a senator anymore, we have a candidate.
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