Blue Herald » GOP Pushing For More Bench Bigotry

Oct

by Buck

GOP Senators to Push Judicial Nominee

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican senators are ready to try again to get one of President Bush’s judicial nominees from Mississippi onto the federal appeals court. But some Democrats seemed ready to put up a fight to keep Leslie Southwick off the bench.

“I am not convinced that he is the right nominee for this court at this time,” said Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
[...]

Southwick has some supporters among Democrats, however, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. “Judge Southwick is a qualified, sensitive and circumspect person,” said Feinstein, who said the nominee was neither insensitive or a racist.

Feinstein provided the winning vote for Southwick in the Senate Judiciary Committee in August, which approved his nomination on a 10-9 vote.

Associated Press

Source: AP

If he was up for any other circuit, there would be no hesitancy. This man ought to be judged on the basis of his own record and his own qualifications.

-Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa.

Hear, hear!

What say you, Arlen, that we take a quick peak at Southwick’s record?

In 1998, Southwick joined a ruling in an employment case that upheld the reinstatement, without any punishment whatsoever, of a white state employee who was fired for calling an African American co-worker a “good ole nigger.” The court’s decision effectively ratified a hearing officer’s opinion that the slur was only “somewhat derogatory” and “was in effect calling the individual a A-teacher’s pet.-” The Mississippi Supreme Court unanimously reversed the decision.

-PFAW

In 2001, Southwick joined a ruling that upheld a chancellor’s decision to take an eight-year-old girl away from her mother and award custody to the father, who had never married the mother, largely because the mother was living with another woman in a “lesbian home.” Southwick went even further by joining a gratuitously anti-gay concurrence which extolled Mississippi’s right under “the principles of Federalism” to treat “homosexual persons” as second-class citizens. The concurrence suggested that sexual orientation is a choice and stated that an adult is not “relieved of the consequences of his or her choice” - e.g. losing custody of one’s child.

-PFAW

Two strong cases to vote no, eh Arlen? If not, there’s more… probably… we really don’t know. You see, “not all of Southwick’s record has been provided to the Judiciary Committee, including records from his tenure in the Bush 41 Department of Justice and more than two year’s worth of unpublished decisions by the Mississippi Court of Appeals in cases on which he voted but did not write an opinion.”

Given what we already know about Southwick, it would be irresponsible for Senators to proceed with his nomination.

-Ralph G. Neas, President, PFAW

Tags: Bush, judicial nominee, federal appeals court, Leslie Southwick
Filed: Snarlin Arlen, The Judiciary

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