Bursting the dam on judicial nominations

On Wednesday, the Senate voted 59-38 to approve the nomination of former Mississippi Court of Appeals Judge Leslie Southwick to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit.

Those not familiar with the process might figure a vote that lopsided means the nomination didn’t generate much controversy.

In fact, like the moment when the lake building behind a dam finally reaches the spillway and begins to pour over, this vote marked a watershed.

Because 60 votes are necessary to end a Senate filibuster, a minority of far-left Democrats have long been able to stall President Bush’s judicial nominations. But in a hard-fought procedural “cloture” vote, the sponsors of Judge Southwick’s nomination managed to line up enough senators to advance the nomination to the floor, 62-35.

One of the grounds on which Americans choose a president is the philosophy of the judges he’s likely to appoint. Yet President Bush has watched numerous judicial appointments languish at the mercy of a far-left minority who can’t win that power at the polls. This high-stakes vote came after two earlier nominees from Mississippi, former U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering and Jackson attorney Michael Wallace, ran into stiff opposition for their so-called “civil rights” records, a phrase which these days refers not to standing in the schoolhouse door but to whether the nominees toe the left-wing line on racial quotas and set-asides.

Judge Pickering served in the position for one year after President Bush named him as a recess appointment. Without Senate confirmation, Pickering was forced to retire in 2004.

There was a price for breaking this bottleneck. The McClatchy-Tribune News Service reports Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi — one of Judge Southwick’s sponsors — “was involved in some last-minute negotiations Tuesday with Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., … who brokered a deal between Democrats and Republicans to move the nomination. … In return, Republicans would agree not to block spending bills.”

If justice has a price, we’ll all be paying more of it, come April 15.

Who were Judge Southwick’s critics?

“I believe Judge Southwick has demonstrated an insensitivity to and disinterest in the cause of civil rights,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

“During a long tenure as a Mississippi state court judge, Judge Southwick compiled a stark and lengthy record of voting on the side of business interests against workers and consumers,” added Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice.

The Congressional Black Caucus also objected to Judge Southwick because he joined a majority opinion upholding the Mississippi Employee Appeals Board’s decision to reinstate a white state employee who had been fired for using the “n-word.”

Critics also complain he joined a ruling to deny custody of a child to a mother who was in a lesbian relationship.

Now, if Judge Southwick is a true racist troglodyte — a man before whom a black person, a blue-collar worker or a homosexual cannot get a fair hearing based on the merits of their case — he should not be serving on any bench.

But does anyone really believe such a character could have won confirmation, 59-38, by the entire U.S. Senate?

What’s really going on here is that a radical cabal of special pleaders has come quite close to imposing on our courts an agenda far distant from color-blind justice and deciding each case on its merits.

Faced with the likelihood of having any appointment to a higher bench ambushed and stalled by a minority of senators who embrace this divisive agenda, such characters hope to impose on every judge a litmus test in which they retire to their chambers before each decision, worrying, “Gosh, I’d better not rule for the employer or the father or the white person in this case; I know how the extremists might make that look, years from now …”

Is this really the kind of justice Americans now want to see from their courts?

Even Democratic Senate Judiciary Committee member Dianne Feinstein of California — not exactly a representative of the Bible Belt — agreed last August that Judge Southwick is intellectually and temperamentally qualified for the job.

It would be nice if this meant we could now expect our judicial nominees to be confirmed or denied based on their real merits and character, rather than the obscure rune-casting of political necromancers in their smoky garrets poring over every line the nominee has ever written, in search of that magically offensive word or phrase.

We shall see.