Prominent blacks charged President Bush deliberately chose a conservative black woman so it would be harder for senators to vote against her. Her defenders responded that liberal ideology was blinding the African-American leaders.

The 11-member Republican majority on the committee is expected to recommend today that the Senate confirm Brown for the D.C. Circuit. The court hears many appeals concerning federal agencies and regulations, and it often serves as a training ground for Supreme Court justices.

African-Americans from many of the 78 national and California groups opposed to Brown's confirmation gathered in the Capitol on Wednesday to ask senators to kill the nomination, either in the committee or on the Senate floor.

''We are here to put [President George] W. [Bush] on notice that we will not be fooled by his cynical plan to seek out blacks, Latinos, women and others who hold the most extreme far-right views for promotion to the federal bench,'' said Joseph Lowery, president emeritus of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Filibusters by Democrats have already prevented final action on four of Bush's judicial nominees: Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen and U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering of Mississippi, both nominated for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans; Alabama Attorney General Bill Pryor, chosen for the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit; and Miguel Estrada of Virginia, who withdrew after a filibuster blocked his appointment to the D.C. Circuit.

''One could almost believe these nominations are put forward in the contemptuous hope they will be rejected, allowing right-thinking senators to be condemned as anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-woman and anti-Catholic,'' said Julian Bond, national NAACP board chairman. ''They seem to think Americans are too stupid to see this crass act for what it is: playing the race card, the ethnicity card, the gender card, the religious card --- playing a cheap political game with justice.''

Dorothy Height, president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, said that even though Brown is African-American, she "has demonstrated a strong, persistent and disturbing hostility toward affirmative action, civil rights enforcement, the rights of people with disabilities, workers, older Americans and women.''

The groups' misgivings are ''nonsense,'' given that 76 percent of California voters supported retaining Brown on California's highest court, said Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, an advocacy group created to promote and defend Bush's judicial nominees.

''The old-line liberal activist groups can only see questions of constitutional interpretation through their liberal lens, which thereby leads them to assume that all judges not in agreement with them are somehow unqualified or unfit,'' Rushton said.

''Not only are Janice Rogers Brown and all of the other nominees of this president qualified, they deserve credit for having the courage to stick to the Constitution, even knowing that they will be harshly attacked by liberal grievance groups,'' he said. Error processing SSI file