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I do not think that because Justice Brown is an African-American woman she has to adhere to a particular political orthodoxy, something that has been suggested by the other side of the aisle. Just as it would be cynical and offensive that Justice Brown be vilified simply for being a Black conservative, it is equally offensive and cynical to suggest that somehow she should get a pass for her outlandish views simply because she is a Black woman. I hope we have arrived at a point in our country's history where Black folks can be criticized for holding views that...

On Wednesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” host Laura Ingraham contrasted President Joe Biden’s vow to nominate a black woman to the Supreme Court to replace outgoing Justice Stephen Breyer with then-Sen. Biden’s opposition to and multiple filibusters of the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the federal bench by then-President George W. Bush in 2003 and 2005 and remarked that “race and gender, they only count if you’re thought to be a committed judicial activist, judicial leftist.” Ingraham said, [relevant remarks begin around 2:50] “I’m thinking back on the nomination of what would’ve been another first,...

Sen. Joe Biden said Sunday that if President Bush nominates recently confirmed Circuit Court Judge Janice Rogers Brown to replace Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats will launch a filibuster. "If [Bush] sent up Edith Jones, I could assure you that would be a very, very, very difficult fight - and she would probably be filibustered," Biden told CBS's "Face the Nation." In the next breath Biden corrected himself, saying, "I misspoke, I misspoke. Janice Rogers Brown is what I meant to say." Asked whether that would break the Senate's much heralded compromise last month not to...

The GOP-controlled Senate on Tuesday ended a nearly two-year Democratic filibuster of California judge Janice Rogers Brown, putting her on track to become the second black woman on what many people consider to be the nation’s second highest court. The 65-32 vote virtually assures the conservative jurist and Alabama native’s confirmation Wednesday evening to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, part of a historic deal to avert a partisan showdown over judicial filibusters. It takes 60 votes to bypass a filibuster. In November 2003, Brown’s Republican supporters were able to get only 53 votes for...

Retired federal judge Janice Rogers Brown warned Tuesday about the perils of the mob that views politics as all important and ignores objective truth. President Donald Trump has had to contend with a fired-up “resistance” of political opposition that will not recognize his presidency as legitimate, Brown suggested. “Prior to the 2016 election, America had a cherished tradition of peacefully transferring power. No riots in the streets. No military coups. George Washington himself set the standard,” Brown said. “However, we now know elections have consequences only when the correct candidate is elected.” Brown, who served on the U.S. Court of...

Last Friday, capping off a week filled with disturbing revelations of bureaucratic incompetence and presidential mendacity concerning Obamacare, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the “reform” law’s notorious contraception mandate. On behalf of the majority, Judge Janice Rogers Brown wrote that the mandate would force the plaintiffs in Gilardi v. HHS to choose between bankruptcy and violating their religious beliefs: “They can either abide by the sacred tenets of their faith, pay a penalty of over $14 million and cripple the companies they have spent a lifetime building, or they become complicit in a grave moral wrong.” This,...

IS JANICE Rogers Brown, the California Supreme Court justice who was just confirmed by the U.S. Senate to sit on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, more mainstream than the Congressional Black Caucus? I'm sure the caucus wouldn't agree. It's members opposed Brown's nomination from the start. In 2003, Maryland's own Rep. Elijah Cummings, who was then CBC chairman, said that Brown was one of several of President Bush's nominees "who are out of the mainstream of America." Brown's supporters noted that the last time her name appeared on a California ballot, she received 76...

WASHINGTON, June 8 - 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."...

"A Whiter Shade of Pale": Sense and Nonsense —The Pursuit of Perfection in Law and PoliticsSpeech of Janice Rogers Brown,Associate Justice, California Supreme CourtThe Federalist Society University of Chicago Law School April 20, 2000, Thursday 12:15 p.m.Thank you. I want to thank Mr. Schlangen (fondly known as Charlie to my secretary) for extending the invitation and the Federalist Society both for giving me my first opportunity to visit the City of Chicago and for being, as Mr. Schlangen assured me in his letter of invitation, "a rare bastion (nay beacon) of conservative and libertarian thought." That latter notion made your...

Yesterday the Senate reached a Compromise on confirmation hearings on certain judicial nominees. But “compromise” normally means an agreement between opposing parties where both make concessions and commit to keeping the bargain. By that standard, this is no compromise. It is, as Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Allow me to prove the point. The 14 signing Senators committed to vote to close debate on the nominations of Priscilla Owen, Janice Brown, and William Pryor for various Circuit Courts. They made no commitment on nominees William Myers and Henry...

Priscilla Owen, 50, is one of the more talented women of her generation. She finished third in her class at Baylor Law School. She had the best score in the state on the Texas bar exam when she took it in 1977. Her performance as a judge on the Texas Supreme Court has earned her the highest rating from the American Bar Association. It's the sort of career that liberals promoting the advancement of women should swoon over. But Senate Democrats are blocking her nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because she is supposedly too conservative, but because...

As the battle over judicial nominees and the role of the filibuster reaches its decisive moment, let's remember that more is at stake than the rules and procedures of the Senate. Resorting to half-truths and invective to advance a political objective — the establishment of a new 60-vote supermajority requirement for the confirmation of federal judges — is deeply unfair to those who have spent a lifetime building reputations for fairness and intellectual probity. Take the case of two women now at the center of the filibuster controversy, Justices Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown. In describing Justices Owen and...

WASHINGTON - Senate Republicans on Tuesday picked Texas judge Priscilla Owen to be the flashpoint of a historic battle over the powers of the White House and minority parties in the Senate to shape the federal judiciary, with the vote expected to occur next week. A small group of moderate senators worked furiously behind the scenes to head off what's been dubbed the "nuclear option" because of its potential for escalating parliamentary warfare between Democrats and Republicans that could stall President Bush's legislative agenda. Republicans announced that Owen's nomination for an appeals court seat will be the vehicle for the...

WASHINGTON — Just days after a bitterly divided Senate committee voted along party lines to approve her nomination as a federal appellate court judge, California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown told an audience Sunday that people of faith were embroiled in a "war" against secular humanists who threatened to divorce America from its religious roots, according to a newspaper account of the speech. Brown's remarks come as a partisan battle over judges has evolved into a national debate over the proper mix of God and government and as Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) ponders changing the chamber's rules...

WASHINGTON, April 20 - As the Senate moves ever closer to a partisan showdown over confirming President Bush's judicial choices, the Judiciary Committee is expected to vote along party lines on Thursday to approve at least two nominees certain to attract a Democratic filibuster in the full Senate. That is fine with those Republicans and their conservative allies who are pressing for a change in Senate rules to prevent filibusters on judicial nominees, an action that could plunge the chamber into an angry deadlock. The reason the champions of a rule change are pleased is that they believe the two...

I’d never heard of a triple black dog double dare to infinity before last weekend. I learned about that fearsome fate from my five-year-old grandson, Mackenzie Watson. I understood it immediately because I was once a five-year-old boy. Plus, my family are willing to swear that I still have those tendencies. To make a long story short, that black dog dare got Mackie in trouble at his kindergarten. He explained he never would have given himself a “swirly” except that another student made that dare. In this case, a swirly means to go in the boy’s bathroom, stick your head...

WASHINGTON -- Senate Republican leaders have decided to begin their use of the "nuclear option" -- forcing confirmation of President Bush's judicial nominations with a majority Senate vote -- on an African-American woman blocked by Democrats from a federal judgeship. Associate Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court was one of 16 Bush nominees for U.S. appellate courts whose confirmation was prevented by Democratic filibusters in the last Congress. With Republicans still short of the 60 senators needed to limit debate, the nuclear option will seek to confirm judges with a simple majority vote through parliamentary maneuvers. Republican...

Will Senate Republicans go "nuclear" for California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown? Columnist Robert Novak reported recently that in March, the GOP will use Brown's now- stalled nomination to the federal bench as a test run for the "nuclear option" - a strategy to foil Democratic filibusters and confirm judges with a simple majority vote, through parliamentary hardball. ... But Brown's star power derives from more than her impressive personal story. She is an intellectual leader of California's high court and its most articulate voice for limited government and individual freedom. A judge's first and last duty, in her...

(CNSNews.com) - A religious watchdog group is blasting the Bush administration for re-submitting the nominations of judges the group has urged the Senate to defeat. On Monday, Bush re-nominated 20 failed judicial nominees, some of which have been denounced by liberals as "right-wing extremists." Americans United for Separation of Church and State Tuesday criticized the Bush administration's "stubbornness" for re-submitting William Pryor and Janice Rogers Brown for nomination to the federal bench. "This administration is bent on radically re-making the federal bench," said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director, in a press release. "No one can take...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - President Bush plans to renominate 20 candidates for federal judgeships who have been unable to win confirmation in the Senate, the White House said today, in a signal that the president is ready for a showdown early next year. "An effective and efficient judicial system is vital to ensuring justice for all Americans," the White House said. "The president nominated highly qualified individuals to the federal courts during his first term, but the Senate failed to vote on many nominations." Senate Democrats have maintained for months that they have routinely confirmed nominees who are not right-wing...