POLITICS: Go Nuclear With Brown
Fund, John H.
POLITICS, JOHN H. FUND Go Nuclear With Brown ITH CHIEF JUSTICE William Rehnquist likely to step down soon due to ill health, Republican senators have decided it's time to break the...
...Circuit, she would be a leading contender for elevation to the Supreme Court...
...36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR April 2005 JOHN H . FUN D If conservative skepticism about Gonzales prompts the president to turn elsewhere, he has several choices...
...Janice Rogers Brown sounds like the kind of nominee that a lot of Americans could come to like and admire...
...Bush has genuine affection for Gonzales, whom he appointed in 1999 to the Texas Supreme Court, where Mr...
...Pete Wilson tapped her as his legal-affairs adviser...
...This case is an excellent example of the folly of courts in their role of philosopher kings," she concluded...
...Judges J. Harvie Wilkinson and J. Michael Luttig of the Fourth U.S...
...Justice Brown wrote that the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment forbids government from forcing "some people alone to bear public burdens, which, in all fairness and justice, should be borne by the public as a whole...
...attorney general...
...She has said some of her colleagues have "an overactive lawmaking gland" that compels them to second-guess legislators...
...While on the court she has not shied away from controversy...
...A judge's first and last duty, in her view, is to protect citizens from bureaucratic bullying...
...two years later he elevated her to the state's highest court...
...So this spring Republican leaders move towards use of the "nuclear option"-demanding a ruling from Vice President Dick Cheney in his capacity as the Senate's president that a majority vote is enough to confirm a judicial nominee...
...John H. Fund, The American Spectator's Politics columnist, is author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books...
...She compared San Francisco's actions to that of a "kleptocracy" which had chosen to ignore the fact that "the free use of private property is just as important as...
...In 1994 Wilson appointed her to a state appeals court...
...April 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 37...
...P O L I T I C S JOHN H . FUN D Go Nuclear With Brown ITH CHIEF JUSTICE William Rehnquist likely to step down soon due to ill health, Republican senators have decided it's time to break the Democrats' use of the filibuster to block judicial nominations before they use it on a Supreme Court vacancy...
...But Gonzales had a rough confirmation battle for the job of attorney general, and he also has many skeptics in the conservative movement...
...But she also has a civil-libertarian streak...
...In kowtowing to the city's homeless lobby, city officials effectively force the small business owners of such hotels to either continue to house the homeless or pay a fee in the hundreds of thousands of dollars if they want to rent out their rooms to tourists instead...
...Advocates of private property rights believe it was that expressed philosophy that prompted her ringing dissent in San Remo Hotel v. San Francisco, a 2002 case in which a majority of the California Supreme Court upheld an extortionate fee that San Francisco slaps on owners of small residential hotels if they want to switch to tourist use...
...Police searched him and found methamphetamine, and he was sentenced to nearly three years in prison...
...in February he called his appointment of Brown "one of the great accomplishments of my two terms as governor...
...From what I know of her, senators who tried such strongarm tactics would come to regret it...
...As she puts it, "Courts must be especially vigilant, must vigorously resist encroachments that heighten the potential for arbitrary government action...
...speech, the press or the free exercise of religion...
...In 2002, the California Supreme Court affirmed the conviction of a black man who had been stopped while riding his bicycle the wrong way on a one-way street...
...John Sununu, the elder Bush's White House chief of staff, assured conservatives that Souter would be a "home run...
...Many fear Gonzales is another Souter, and with the court divided 5-4 on racial preferences and many other crucial issues, the stakes are high with any nominee...
...Harold Johnson, an attorney with the Pacific Legal Foundation, calls her "an intellectual leader of California's high court and its most articulate voice for limited government and individual freedom...
...Emilio Garza and Edith Jones, both judges on the Fifth Circuit, have strong champions within the conservative Federalist Society...
...He turned out instead to be one of the most liberal justices on the court...
...Says California businessman Ward Connerly, who led the campaign for Proposition 209: "No one who knows her doesn't believe she would come out on top and leave her critics in the dust...
...But should the President decide not to appoint Gonzalez for a Supreme Court vacancy, I believe a frontrunner for a vacancy would be Justice Brown...
...She went to work in the state attorney general's office, and in 1991 Gov...
...A clear expression of her frustration with judicial activists came in 1997, when she wrote a dissent in a case where the court majority struck down a state law stipulating that minors had to obtain parental consent for an abortion...
...They will lead off with one of President George W. Bush's most appealing and qualified appointees: Janice Rogers Brown, currently an associate justice of the California Supreme Court...
...Bush prizes Gonzales's loyalty, and appointing the first Hispanic to the Supreme Court could help win votes among a crucial voting bloc...
...Should she win confirmation to the U.S...
...He called his appointment of Brown "one of the great accomplishments of my two terms as governor" She found that it ran afoul of Proposition 209, the 1996 state initiative that abolished racial preferences by state and local governments...
...Bush, promoted Clarence Thomas to a seat on the high court after he had served only ten months on the appeals court...
...Justice Brown described preferences as an "entitlement based on group representation" and said they have had pernicious effects on society...
...Justice Brown is a respected jurist with a compelling life story as the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper who attended segregated schools and then put herself through college and law school...
...13ORN INTO POVERTY IN ALABAMA IN 1949, Brown arrived in California as a child and worked her way through college at Cal State Sacramento and law school at UCLA...
...Until recently, the most likely candidate for elevation to the high court was Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel who is now U.S...
...Gonzales gave few signals as to his underlying judicial philosophy...
...As high-octane as those statements are, Justice Brown's most controversial legal writing will likely be another opinion she wrote in a 2000 case that struck down a minority contracting program in San Jose...
...Court of Appeals for the D.C...
...Circuit Court of Appeals have excellent resumes and strong conservative records...
...When I spoke with him in Washington, D.C...
...Her opinion led some liberals to tag her as "a female Clarence Thomas...
...Justice Brown was a lone dissenter from that opinion, arguing that the circumstances of the arrest could be seen as racial profiling...
...Recall that Bush's father, President George H.W...
...But she also is someone who may stir up a whirlwind of opposition from liberal senators...
...They recall that in 1990, Bush's father appointed a largely unknown David Souter to the Supreme Court...
Vol. 38 • April 2005 • No. 3
