The judicial nomination wars, dormant in recent months, re-emerged Tuesday as the Senate narrowly confirmed a nominee who has argued that abortion is akin to the Holocaust and that the Bible requires women to be subservient to men.
The Senate voted 51-46 to put J. Leon Holmes on the federal bench in Arkansas after a fierce debate in which some Republican women voted against the nomination, made by President Bush, while Democrats from Holmes’ home state of Arkansas supported him.
Holmes has a record of saying such things as rape victims become pregnant as often as it snows in Miami. He also wrote in 1997 that in a marriage “the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man.”
The crosscurrent of Arkansas politics provided an unusual twist to the settled routine in which Republican senators regularly argue that a nominee’s beliefs will have no influence on the candidate’s performance as a judge — the two Democrats from Arkansas, Sens. Mark Pryor and Blanche Lincoln, were making that argument on Tuesday.
Pryor argued that despite Holmes’ personal views, Pryor was confident Holmes would be an impartial judge. Pryor said his confidence in Holmes was due to letters supporting the nominee from many prominent Arkansas residents. Lincoln said she had “the utmost confidence” in Holmes’ ability to be fair, also saying she had been told so by prominent Arkansans.
Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said Holmes’ nomination had languished for 14 months before Republicans brought it up for a floor vote because the GOP was embarrassed by it.
“It was quite clear that he had made numerous strident, intemperate and insensitive public statements over the years” on several issues, including school desegregation, political emancipation and school prayer, he said.
Referring to Holmes’ rape comment, Leahy said that while it snowed in Miami once in a hundred years, more than 20,000 rape victims are made pregnant each year.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said that it was unfair to use Holmes’ rape comment against him because he made it more than 20 years ago and has since apologized and repudiated it.
Holmes also said his 1997 comparison of the Catholic Church’s subservient relationship with Jesus Christ to a wife’s duties to her husband was unfairly taken out of context. In an article he co-authored with his wife, he said a wife has an obligation “to subordinate herself to her husband” and “to place herself under the authority of the man.”
Six Democrats voted for Holmes, while five Republicans opposed the nominee. In addition to Sens. John Warner of Virginia, and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, the other three Republicans voting against Holmes were women: Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, of Maine.
In addition to Lincoln and Pryor, the Democrats who supported the nomination were Sens. Zell Miller of Georgia, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and John Breaux and Mary Landrieu, both of Louisiana.
