Picking on Pickering.

I applaud the recent media efforts by Mike Wallace and Nat Hentoff among others to tell Judge Charles Pickering's side of the story. He, you will remember, is the federal judge whose appointment to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by George W. Bush was filibustered by the Democrats, so that he serves only by virtue of a recess appointment that runs out next year. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Pickering of "glaring racial insensitivity" The facts are that Pickering had sent his children to an integrated school while many white Mississippians were doing otherwise, had successfully defended a young black man accused of robbing a white girl at knifepoint, had testified against the killer of civil fights worker Vernon Dahmer and had been rewarded with the Ku Klux Klan's successful opposition to his effort to gain reelection to the state Senate. Deborah Gambrell, who has represented the NAACP in a case before Pickering, says she is "shocked and appalled" at the attack on him by Senate Democrats.

I hope this is not another example of what the Democrats did to Clement Haynsworth when Richard Nixon nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1969. Haynsworth had earned a reputation as a sound, if conservative, judge. The main evidence against him was that he had failed to recuse himself from a few cases against large companies in which he held stock that was far from a major stake. There was no evidence that his holdings had influenced his judgment. Yet the Democrats, fresh from losing the White House to a man they heartily and justifiably detested, were itching to give Nixon a bloody nose. They crusaded against Haynsworth as if he were evil incarnate, and defeated his nomination by a vote of 55-45. Nixon then thumbed his nose at the Democrats by nominating the absurdly unqualified G. Harrold Carswell, and additional months of senatorial efforts then had to be devoted to defeating him. After Carswell was defeated, Nebraska senator Roman Hruska rose to say: "Even if he is mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they ...?" He was serious--for good reason. His own ability, to put it as gently as possible, was a constant source of justifiable modesty.