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Priscilla, Queen of the Wingnuts

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Eric Boehlert is terrific on one of the justices the Democrats are grimly obstructing. Given that the GOP has chosen to make her the focus of their threat to change the Senate’s rules. First, some crucial background that makes it clear that the claim that the Democrats are engaging in some kind of radical tactics in the face of a typical appointments process is absurd:

In another, Republicans complain bitterly that Bush’s judges are not getting fair hearings, yet Owen is the first nominee in Senate history to be given a hearing, to be rejected by the Judiciary Committee, and then to be renominated to the federal bench by the president.

What’s more, the opening on the 5th Circuit for which Bush nominated Owen exists only because Republicans for years refused to hold up-or-down votes on three judges nominated separately by President Clinton. Yet now Republicans are demanding an up-or-down vote on Owen.

It should be obvious, then, that only the most in-the-tank Republican lickspittle would blame this conflict entirely on the Democrats. And, surely, if the Republicans could various counter-majoritarian rules to prevent votes on nominees they don’t like, Democrats can too.

But even granting that turnabout is fair play, are the Democrats keeping the next Oliver Wendell Holmes off the bench for ideological reasons? Er, no.

The American Bar Association rated Owen well qualified, but she received much lower marks from members of her local Houston Bar Association. According to its 2003 survey of Texas jurists, the most recent poll available from the association, just 43 percent labeled her work “outstanding,” and 47 percent thought her performance on the bench was “poor.” Hers was the highest “poor” rating of any of the justices on the all-Republican Texas Supreme Court. Interestingly, Owen received her lowest marks in response to the question asking whether she was “impartial and open-minded with respect to determining the legal issues.”

“We’re not talking about a jurist who’s widely respected,” Turley says. He supports nine of the 12 Bush nominees whom Democrats have balked at confirming. Owen is not among them. “She’s a low-quality appointment,” Turley says. “There’s no reason why, on the merits, she’d be elevated to the federal bench. I could think of two dozen very conservative judges who could contribute more.”

[…]

Editorial page writers might be dismissed as natural adversaries of Owen’s. But between 1999 and 2000, the person who most effectively chronicled the judge’s aggressive judicial activism while she was ensconced in the Texas court’s ultraconservative faction and dissented on dozens of cases decided by the all-Republican court was none other than Attorney General Gonzales.

As the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way has documented, in the span of less than two years then-Justice Gonzales singled out Owen’s dissents 11 times, accusing her of ignoring the legislative intent of laws and instead struggling to manufacture an outcome.

All of the article is worth reading; among other gems it finds yet another brick thrown up by the hapless Assrocket. At any rate, Owen is a radically reactionary judge of no distinction whatsoever. There is absolutely nothing unusual about Democrats using the traditional tools of the Senate to prevent her from receiving a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. Bush knew in re-appointing her that she would be filibustered, and went ahead anyway–which is his perogative. But this struggle cannot be reduced to “Democratic obstructionism,” and Senate Dems have no constitutional, political, or legal obligation to allow this fifth-rate crackpot to be appointed to the federal courts.

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