According to this in today’s Washington Post, the Senate Judiciary Committee is about to send the nominations of Priscilla Owen and Janice Brown to the full Senate, thus provoking another Democratic filibuster.
It won’t be a pretty sight. Here’s a brief description of these two nominees by Republican Senator Rick Santorum:
[Owen] has shown time and again that the American Bar Association got it right when it unanimously awarded her its highest possible rating. She was also reelected with 84 percent of the vote in 2000 and had the endorsement of every newspaper in Texas. Owen has earned the support of a clear majority of senators.
She is not alone. This July will mark almost two years since the president nominated Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Brown started life as the daughter of a sharecropper in the segregated South and through hard work and determination became the first African American woman to serve on California’s highest court. In 2002 she was called upon by her colleagues to write the majority opinion more often than any other member of the California Supreme Court. She was retained with 76 percent of the vote in her last election. In short, Brown has shown herself to be unquestionably trustworthy, highly intelligent and well within the mainstream, and she has earned the enthusiastic support of a majority of the U.S. Senate.
Yet, these two jurists still have not been confirmed because a collection of Democratic senators refuse to allow the Senate to conduct an up-or-down vote on their nominations.
Well, of course they haven’t been confirmed. Everybody (or at least every Democrat) knows that all the people in Texas, not just 84% of them, are out of the mainstream, as is any black person who has drifted off the liberal plantation, no matter how many majority opinions she’s written for the California Supreme Court.
