The battle over President Bush’s beleaguered judicial nominee, Charles Pickering, heated up Thursday, with a Republican senator accusing Pickering’s opponents of a “lynching” and “dishonorable character assassination” and Democratic senators insisting the nominee was not worthy of the appeals court.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was to have voted Thursday on Pickering’s nomination to the federal appellate bench, but with the vote set to go 10-9 against Pickering, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) demanded a week’s delay. The vote appears to be running along strict party lines, and Republicans have twice obtained one-week delays to rally support.
Pickering would be the first Bush judicial nominee to be rejected. Both sides see the battle as a crucial test of how the president’s future nominees, including Supreme Court appointments, will fare in the Senate, where Democrats hold a one-vote majority.
Opponents of the nomination say Pickering is opposed to civil rights and as such is unqualified for the job. He already sits on the federal bench in Mississippi, and would sit on the appeals court covering Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana.
“If Charles Pickering is not confirmed, it will certainly send a signal to the White House and to the senators,” said Gloria Feldt, president of Planned Parenthood and a Pickering opponent. “Either way it goes, it will be a very important statement.”
The extra week is unlikely to change Pickering’s fate, because all 10 Democratic senators have said they will oppose him. But part of the Republican strategy is to make the Democrats pay a political price by painting them as obstructionists.
With the committee vote seemingly a “foregone conclusion,” as Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) acknowledged, some Republicans are arguing that the nomination should go to the Senate floor anyway–a highly unusual move. Pickering would be more likely to win on the Senate floor than in the more partisan committee.
Hatch gets angry
Hatch, the committee’s top Republican and a veteran of two decades of judicial battles, raised his voice several times during the hearing. “I’m not in a happy mood this morning, it’s easy to see,” Hatch growled, and he and committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) interrupted each other repeatedly.
Hatch unleashed his anger at activist groups that have organized an apparently successful crusade against Pickering, portraying the Mississippi jurist as a racially insensitive figure who puts his personal opinion above the law.
In addition to calling the anti-Pickering campaign a lynching and leveling a charge of character assassination, Hatch blamed “engineering by extreme-left Washington special-interest groups who are out of touch with the mainstream and have a political ax to grind.”
He added, “For them, the means justify the ends at whatever the cost–including the gross distortion of this fine man’s record and character.”
Hatch’s targets boiled at his remarks, saying they had merely been exercising their constitutional right to voice their opinions. Nan Aron, president of the liberal Alliance for Justice, called Hatch’s comments “inappropriate and malicious and off-the-mark.”
Aron added that Hatch is upset because a Pickering defeat would bode poorly for other Bush nominees. “Orrin Hatch knows that, and Orrin Hatch is afraid, because most of them have records just as bad as Judge Pickering,” Aron said.
Pickering did not attend the hearing. On Wednesday, Bush invited Pickering to the White House, telling reporters: “I think the country is tired of people playing politics all the time in Washington.”
The nominee, a friend of Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), has been criticized for his stand on several hot-button issues during his long career. As a law student in 1959, he wrote an article on how to strengthen a state law against interracial marriage. As a state senator, he voted to fund the segregationist Sovereignty Commission.
More recently, Pickering intervened to reduce the sentence of a cross burner in 1994. Critics say that as a judge, he has been overruled summarily and frequently because he ignores long-established precedent when it interferes with his conservative beliefs.
A `different man today’
Pickering’s supporters, however, say many of those events are being plucked out of context and that in reality he was a progressive in a deeply segregationist state.
During the 1960s, Pickering testified against a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan at great peril to himself, his supporters say. They argue that like many other Southerners who came of age in the civil rights era, he has changed over the past 40 years.
“I would not support Charles Pickering as a state senator in the early 1960s,” Specter said. “I believe he is a very, very different man today than he was as a state senator in the early 1960s.”
Battles over presidential nominees have become a staple of Washington life, prompting intense mobilization, from phone banks to press conferences to extensive research into the appointee’s background.
Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) decried Hatch’s use of the word “lynching.”
“I would like to see the rhetoric tamped down,” said Schumer. “To call this a lynching is not appropriate.”
Hatch responded: “It’s a tough word. I certainly wasn’t referring to my colleagues. But I’ve seen this every eight years when we have a Republican president, and it’s deeply offensive to me.”
Confirmation process criticized
The exchanges over Pickering erupted into a debate over how the confirmation process had gone badly awry. Since the Senate’s 1987 rejection of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, these battles have become personal and vicious, and senators on both sides spoke of the need to fix the system.
“We’re on the verge of an institutional crisis here, and both sides are responsible for it,” said Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.). “I fear we are inching toward a place where no one can be confirmed.”
Some Democrats, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, said the White House should consult more with senators before submitting its nominees. Although she has not had this problem, Feinstein said, “Other members on this side of the aisle are not consulted, are rather insulted, by the process.”
Thursday’s tense hearing did produce one moment of levity. As he questioned Hatch’s rhetoric, Schumer said: “I love you. You are a great guy. You’re even fun when you get angry.”
“I love you too,” responded Hatch. “But it’s getting harder all the time.”
