Anti-religious, and now Anti-black?

I've written a bit about the efforts of Senate Democrats to utilize an apparent litmus test for appointees to the federal bench. Are they serious Catholics or Evangelicals? Yes? Forget it! Although some respected law professors such as Eugene Volokh (most recently here) has argued that there is no proof of anti-Catholic bias at work, I've agreed with his UCLA colleague Steven Bainbridge (most recently here), who's argument has moved from the legal sphere to, most recently, the moral. That's surely the correct way to view these battles, with the political angle thrown in. What the left cannot impose through the ballot box, it's attempting to win through judicial fiat. By refusing to allow an up or down vote on the President's nominees, Democrats are, in effect, administering a religious test for office. And, like many others, I don't accept the premise that everyone on the left's team is free of religious bigotry, at least as applied to people who take their religion too seriously for their tastes.

A nominee for the U.S. Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, however, hasn't received as much individual attention as she deserves. Janice Rogers Brown, who happens to be the daughter of black sharecroppers, was born in Jim Crowe Alabama in 1949. Her story is featured in a new column by Terrence P. Jeffrey, who calls Justice Brown, a member of the California Supreme Court, the left's "worst nightmare."

As indeed she is. For she represents the same kind of threat posed by another daughter of Alabama, Condoleezza Rice, or one of Georgia's most famous sons, Clarence Thomas. What makes the Democrats' patronizing bigotry so transparent isn't simply the lectures Justice Brown must suffer from her lily white interrogators; it's the fact that she was elected easily to the California Supreme Court on more than one occasion. Here's how Jeffrey sums up that portion of her career:

When California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown faced a 1998 retention, 76 percent of Californians voted to keep her on their state's highest court. In San Francisco, perhaps America's most liberal city, she won 79.4 percent.

Justice Brown won more votes statewide than any of the other three justices up for retention that year -- though she had cast a (dissenting) vote in favor of the state's parental-consent law. But when President Bush nominated Justice Brown to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 2003, her demonstrated support in places like San Francisco did not matter to Senate Democrats.

It certainly didn't, since they've filibustered her nomination for almost two years. Jeffrey states at one point in his column that the left won't approve an intellectually honest person, meaning one who isn't guaranteed to maintain abortion-on-demand as a Constitutional right. He's correct in this, without doubt, but I think the racial angle simply adds to the left's antipathy for Justice Brown.

If the left is bankrupt intellectually, as Martin Peretz and others on the left have admitted, nowhere is that status more obvious than in the realm of racial politics. By vilifying the ability of the free market to create opportunities for all people, and by demeaning the remarkable progress made by African Americans over the past 40 years, the left has engaged in a Ponzi scheme with their largest constituency. But the hidden commodity in this version of the game isn't money that's shifted from victim to victim, but the utter failure of liberal policies to achieve their proclaimed ends. Add to that the malicious race-baiting that has long been a mainstay of Democratic politics, and the threat posed by the Janice Rogers Browns of the country becomes clear.

Here's how Jeffrey concludes his column:

When she was a child in the South, Senate Democrats used the filibuster to defend segregation and keep Janice Brown out of whites-only schools and accommodations. Today, they use it to keep her off the federal bench. Now, no less than then, they use the tactic to maintain a morally indefensible policy they fear sustained national attention and debate would crush.

Republicans must not let them get away with it.

Indeed they must not, for the good of the country, and for the honor of Justice Brown.