As an intelligent Ca resident what's wrong with this women?
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thomassowell/ts20031021.shtmlBy: Thomas Sowell
October 21, 2003
The nomination of Justice Janice Rogers Brown of the California Supreme Court to become a federal Court of Appeals judge has brought out vicious special interest groups with their long knives -- and a long record of smears and character-assassination, going back to the campaign of wholesale misrepresentations that defeated the nomination of Judge Robert Bork in 1987.
Leading the charge against Justice Brown, as it did against Judge Bork 16 years ago, is the grossly misnamed organization "People for the American Way." This is a far-left group with only contempt for American traditions and culture. They want judges who will dismantle the Constitution of the United States for the sake of current left-wing fashions like racial quotas and unlimited abortions.
They obviously think that the pious words in their name will conceal the brutal realities of what they are and what they do.
Judges who believe that their job is to uphold the Constitution, instead of replacing it with left-wing social engineering, are anathema to "People for the American Way." That they are spearheading the character assassination of Justice Janice Rogers Brown is completely predictable.
Because Justice Brown is black and conservative, she is being denounced as "another Clarence Thomas." Like Clarence Thomas, she is also being denounced as "unqualified" by people who have never read a word she wrote. Anyone who does read Justice Brown's opinions will discover a wealth of knowledge, a command of logic and an unflinching honesty about the law and about some efforts of her colleagues to compromise legal principles.
"Error," Justice Brown said in one dissent, "does not improve with repetition. The third time is not the charm." In another dissent, this time in a child-custody case, Justice Brown said: "Today's decision maximizes the self-interest and personal convenience of parents, but poorly serves the state's children who deserve as much stability and security as legal process can provide."
What the left-wing can never forgive her for is upholding the right of California voters to ban racial quotas. More than four and a half million Californians voted for Proposition 209, which outlawed group preferences and quotas. But liberals wanted the state Supreme Court to over-rule the voters. Janice Rogers Brown refused and instead wrote the majority opinion upholding the voters' right to make the laws under which they live.
In the country at large, the real issue behind all the sound and fury is that special interest groups like "People for the American Way" want judges to impose items in the left-wing agenda that cannot be imposed through the democratic process.
Nowhere in this country are racial quotas likely to get voter support. But such quotas exist because elected officials do not have to risk their careers by voting for quotas because they can leave that to judges.
That includes not only liberal judges but also weak-kneed "conservative" judges like Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy, who on issue after issue tend to split the difference and go along to get along.
What really scares the left about Janice Rogers Brown is that she has guts as well as brains. They haven't been able to get her to weaken or to waver. Character assassination is all that the left has left.
Look to see Justice Brown portrayed as evil incarnate and a threat to the republic. Already the character assassins are throwing around words like "extremist" and a conservative "activist." The truth has not cramped their style in the past and is unlikely to do so during the current confirmation hearings.
The real question is whether the administration that nominated Justice Brown will mount a serious counter-attack or leave her out there, twisting in the wind, the way it did with Miguel Estrada and its other judicial nominees.
Have you seen anything by anybody, anywhere, defending Janice Rogers Brown? The attackers have been mobilizing for months but there is very little sign that those who nominated Justice Brown have made any timely efforts to mobilize counter forces.
The preservation of a viable constitutional government is not a task for wimps." So said California's state Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown. If there is any doubt about that, those doubts are sure to be erased during Justice Brown's confirmation hearings to become a member of the federal Court of Appeals in Washington.
The lynch mob atmosphere that has prevailed during confirmation hearings for judges who believe in upholding the Constitution is already in evidence among the special interest groups who are more concerned with their own political agendas than with anything as abstract as the rule of law.
Justice Brown is just the opposite. Social agendas are not her business as a judge and the integrity of the law is. "The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable," she wrote in one of her opinions, where she dissented from a majority decision that she found "a little endearing." She added: "There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court."
Justice Brown has repudiated the notion of judges acting as if they were, in her words, "philosopher kings." Yet such expansive conceptions of the role of judges is what has enabled courts to enact so much of the liberal agenda over the past two generations, when the voting public would never have stood for such things as racial quotas or the creation of new "rights" for criminals out of thin air, if this had been done by elected officials.
Liberal-left activist groups with pretty names like the People for the American Way, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People all understand that much of what they want cannot be enacted into law by legislators who have to face the voters at the next election. It can only be enacted into law from the judicial bench by judges with lifetime jobs, pretending to "interpret" the law when in fact they are creating law.
Judges who oppose having courts engaging in social engineering are likely to find their own nominations opposed by liberal special interest groups, whether their names are Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas or Janice Rogers Brown. And, since the real reasons for opposition to such judges cannot be admitted publicly, phony reasons have to be concocted -- and repeated endlessly through the media until they become "well-known facts."
With Judge Bork, one of the claims was that he was against civil rights for minorities. Yet the people who made that charge could not find a single example where someone from a minority had ever lost a civil rights case in Bork's court.
Robert Bork had been on the same side as the NAACP in numerous cases when he was Solicitor General. But the facts did not matter. Stopping Judge Bork from being on the Supreme Court did.
Charges against Clarence Thomas were even dirtier -- and just as unsubstantiated. The same Congressional critics who demanded that the Senate "get to the bottom of this" in response to sexual charges refused to vote for a subpoena that could have brought out facts about the credibility of the witness who made the charges.
Getting to the bottom of this was the last thing they wanted. They wanted to keep Judge Thomas off the Supreme Court. That they failed was due primarily to his own defiant defense and to the women who had once worked for him who came to testify for him.
