LA Times
June 08, 2005
By Maura Reynolds
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WASHINGTON The Senate voted today to confirm California's Janice Rogers Brown to a seat on the prestigious Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., a job that could place her on President Bush's short list of potential Supreme Court nominees.
Brown, who has served on the California Supreme Court since 1996, was confirmed by a vote of 56-43. Only one Democrat crossed party lines to support her nomination; both California senators voted against her.
Democrats vehemently opposed Brown's nomination, decrying her as a conservative ideologue who infuses her court rulings with her political views.
"Whether one is from the left or the right, this nominee should be rejected," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said before the vote. "We should reject all nominees who twist the law to their own ideological bent."
The circuit court of appeals for the District of Columbia is considered the second-highest court in the country, behind the Supreme Court, and is frequently a steppingstone for judges to that court. Three of the Supreme Court's nine sitting justices were elevated from the D.C. court.
"There's no doubt she'll be on any future Republican short list for the Supreme Court as a conservative African American woman," said Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, an advocacy group that promotes the president's conservative judicial nominees. "It's the very knowledge of this that explains why she has been opposed with such fervor by the left."
Brown's nomination had been stalled since November 2003 by a Democratic filibuster. A private pact between a group of moderate Republicans and Democrats last month that ended the Senate deadlock over judges cleared the way for her confirmation vote.
Brown was the second judge confirmed as a result of the moderates' agreement. The first was Priscilla Owen, who was sworn in this week to the federal court of appeals in New Orleans. The third is expected to be Alabama Atty. Gen. William Pryor, whose confirmation vote is scheduled Thursday.
During the debate over her nomination, Republicans praised Brown's rise from humble origins and accused Democrats of unfairly disparaging her legal rulings.
"She has lived the American dream and she's lived it well," said Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) "She didn't just complain about her status. She worked and she tried to get an education and she applied herself, and she's been given opportunities and she's taken advantage of them.... I really do believe that most of the opposition to her has been just simply the fact that she is an African-American conservative woman."
Brown's nomination was opposed by the Congressional Black Caucus, whose members from the House of Representatives marched to the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol in advance of the vote to urge her nomination be rejected.
"The test of a qualified judicial nominee is not whether or not that person has their own political views. Every jurist surely does," said Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.). "The test is whether he or she can effectively subordinate their views in order to decide each case on the facts and the merits alone... Janice Rogers Brown has shown that she is not simply a judge with very strong political views, she is a political activist who happens to be a judge."
Obama, who is the only African American member of the Senate, also criticized Republicans for lauding Brown's minority status.
"Just as it would be cynical and offensive that Judge Rogers Brown be vilified simply for being a black conservative, it's equally offensive and cynical to suggest that somehow she should get a pass for her outlandish views simply because she's a black woman," Obama said.
Brown, 56, was born into a sharecropper's family in Alabama but her father made a career in the Air Force, settling in Sacramento.
She worked as a telephone operator to put herself through Cal State Sacramento and law school at UCLA. She served as former Gov. Pete Wilson's legal affairs advisor and he named her to the state Supreme Court.
She was twice rated unqualified as a judge by the state bar committee, which said she infused her court rulings with her political views. But legal scholars later disputed that view, praising her intellect and writing style.