Janice Rogers Brown has some bizarre, and yes, I believe, dangerous views on the world. That's fine if she was just a greeter at Wal*Mart, but it is NOT fine if she were to become Appeals Court Judge. Her kind of bizarre thinking has NO legitimate place on the judiciary at ANY level.
Think she is just a nice black lady who deserves any judicial position Bushy wants to slide her into?
If you think that, examine her positions...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/19/AR2005051900956_2.htmlIn many ways, Brown's court rulings and speeches mirror the thinking of Bush and conservatives coast to coast.
An outspoken Christian conservative from the segregated South, she supports limits on abortion rights and corporate liability, routinely upholds the death penalty and opposes affirmative action.
"A lot of judges get to the point they think they were anointed and not appointed," Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said Tuesday during floor debate. "I don't think anyone can contend she has performed other than admirably on the bench. She has written beautifully and thoughtfully."
Brown's views are also why Democrats have used a filibuster since 2003 to block her confirmation for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate's 55 Republicans have a clear majority to confirm but not the 60 votes need to break the filibuster.
"She has criticized the New Deal, which gave us Social Security, the minimum wage, and fair labor laws. She's questioned whether age discrimination laws benefit the public interest," said Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "No one with these views should be confirmed to a federal court and certainly not to the federal court most responsible for cases affecting government action."
and farther down...
"She defended her faith-based approach to the law again last month, telling a gathering of Roman Catholic legal professionals in Darien, Conn., that "these are perilous times for people of faith, not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud."
Janice Rogers Brown apparently is one of the right wing nut jobs who is part of the "Constitution in Exile".
http://www.acsblog.org/economic-regulation-employment-1217-jeffrey-rosen-on-athe-constitution-in-exilea.html" Other potential Bush Supreme Court nominees Rosen discusses as potential adherents of the Constitution in Exile include Janice Rogers Brown (who called 1937, the year in which the Supreme Court stopped striking down New Deal legislation on constitutional grounds “the triumph of our socialist revolution.”), J. Michael Luttig and John Roberts."
More on teh "Constitution in Exile" insane ideas
herehttp://www.acsblog.org/judicial-nominations-700-the-return-of-constitution-in-exile.htmlBut, Janice Rogers Brown has her little fingers all gooey from ALL KINDS of nut job pies! She's a big one for the "FEDERALIST SOCIETY".
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/5/1/225323/5346
"The Big Lie: Right Wing Plays the Race Card on Judicial Nominations
by Armando
Sun May 1st, 2005 at 19:53:23 PDT
You knew it was coming because the Right Wing is shameless. And here it is - the shameless playing of the race card by the GOP, right from the bottom of the deck:
Why are Senate Democrats so afraid of conservative judicial nominees who are African Americans, Hispanics, Catholics, and women? Because these Clarence Thomas nominees threaten to split the Democratic base by aligning conservative Republicans with conservative voices in the minority community and appealing to suburban women. The Democrats need Bush to nominate conservatives to the Supreme Court whom they can caricature and vilify, and it is much harder for them to do that if Bush nominates the judicial equivalent of a Condi Rice rather than a John Ashcroft.
What shameless liars. Indeed, the opposite is true. The GOP chooses African-Americans and women to be the most extreme, out of the mainstream nominees imaginable. And yes Clarence Thomas is Exhibit A of that theory. Why do they do this? To try and cow legitmate opposition to the unbelievably extreme positions they want their nominees to hold, and they believe the only way to get these extreme views confirmed by the Senate is to cynically play the race card - to wit, nominate African-Americans and women who hold these extreme, out of the mainstream views.
The truth is no bar to the GOP's offensive use of the race card. Take this description:
Take Janice Rogers Brown, who won reelection to her state supreme court seat with a stunning 76 percent of the vote in one of the bluest of the blue states, California.
First of all, Rogers Brown was not reelected, rather she was facing the voters for the FIRST time in 1998 on a vote of retention after being named to the California Supreme Court in 1996. Brown would not be up for re-election for another 12 years, in 2008. More importantly, a 76% vote for a California Supreme Court Justice is NOT stunning, particularly one with only 2 years on the Court. For example, from California Appellate Counselor:
Four current members of the California Supreme Court were up for retention in the November 1998 election -- Chief Justice Ronald George, Justice Stanley Mosk, Justice Ming Chin and Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Most of the attention centered on Chief Justice George and Justice Chin, who had incurred the wrath of certain abortion foes by voting to strike down a statute that required unmarried teenagers to obtain the consent of a parent or judge for an abortion. Justices Mosk and Brown dissented from that decision[,] ... American Academy of Pediatrics v. Lungren, 16 Cal. 4th 307 (1997).
As it turned out, the elections were no contest. All four were retained by substantial margins. Here are the final results, as reported in the Los Angeles Times:
Chief Justice Ronald M. George
Confirm 4,131,213 (75 percent)
Reject 1,354,994 (25 percent)
Associate Justice Stanley Mosk
Confirm 3,695,777 (70 percent)
Reject 1,557,390 (30 percent)
Associate Justice Ming W. Chin
Confirm 3,723,584 (69 percent)
Reject 1,669,841 (25 percent)
Associate Justice Janice R. Brown
Confirm 3,884,203 (76 percent)
Reject 1,255,502 (24 percent)
As you can see, distorting the facts is no impediment for the Right Wing. In an election where the Religious Right targetted liberal Justices, Rogers Brown, an afterthought in this election, "stunned" with the same result as the targetted Chief Justice.
More importantly, the Right Wing simply lies about the basis of Democratic opposition to Rogers Brown:
Justice Brown's disdain for government runs so deep that she urges "conservative" judges to invalidate legislation that expands the role of government, saying that it "inevitably transform[s]... a democracy ... into a kleptocracy." Following her own "pro-activist" advice, Justice Brown - always in dissent - uses constitutional provisions or defies the legislature's intent to restrict or invalidate laws she doesn't like, such as California's anti-discrimination statute (which she condemns as protecting only "narrow" personal interests), hotel development fees intended to preserve San Francisco's affordable housing supply, rent control ordinances, statutory fees for manufacturers that put lead-based products into the stream of commerce, and a false advertising law applied to companies making false claims about their workplace practices to boost sales. Justice Brown's colleagues on the court have repeatedly remarked on her disrespect for such legislative policy judgments, criticizing her, in different cases, for "imposing ... [a] personal theory of political economy on the people of a democratic state"; asserting "such an activist role for the courts"; "quarrel[ing]... not with our holding in this case, but with this court's previous decision ... and, even more fundamentally, with the Legislature itself"; and "permit[ting] a court ... to reweigh the policy choices that underlay a legislative or quasi-legislative classification or to reevaluate the efficacy of the legislative measure."
Need more? Here's a review of the substance of the Roger Brown record, matters the Right Wing liars and cynical players of the race card will NOT discuss:
The report, "Loose Cannon," notes that when Brown was nominated to the state supreme court in 1996, she was found unqualified by the state bar evaluation committee, based not only on her relative inexperience but also because she was "prone to inserting conservative political views into her appellate opinions" and based on complaints that she was "insensitive to established precedent."
The report carefully examines Brown's record since she joined the court, especially her numerous dissenting opinions concerning civil and constitutional rights. Brown's many disturbing dissents, often not joined by a single other justice, make it clear that she would use the power of an appeals court seat to try to erect significant barriers for victims of discrimination to seek justice in the courts, and to push an agenda that would undermine privacy, equal protection under the law, environmental protection, and much more.
In speeches, Brown has embraced the extreme states' rights and anti-federal-government positions of the Federalist Society, the organization of lawyers and judges working to push the law far to the right. She has said that what she has called the "Revolution of 1937," when the Supreme Court began to consistently sustain New Deal legislation against legal attack, was a "disaster" that marked "the triumph of our socialist revolution."
More in extended.
Republicans :: :: Trackback ::
More of the Rogers Brown judicial record.
Civil Rights, Equal Opportunity, and Discrimination
According to the report, "Justice Brown's opinions on civil rights law are perhaps the most troubling area of a very troubling body of work. These opinions reveal significant skepticism about the existence and impact of discrimination and demonstrate repeated efforts to limit the avenues available to victims of discrimination to obtain justice. Brown's opinions in this area reveal a troubling disregard for precedent and stare decisis - even in the context of case law that has been settled by the U.S. Supreme Court."
The report examines Brown opinions in cases involving racial discrimination, discrimination against people with disabilities and older Americans, and affirmative action. California's Chief Justice criticized one of her opinions as arguing that "numerous decisions of the United States Supreme Court and this court" were "wrongly decided" and as representing a "serious distortion of history."
Free Speech and Association
Brown's free speech opinions illustrate her tendency to rule in favor of corporations and seek to provide broad protections for corporate speech, while sometimes giving short shrift to the First Amendment rights of average citizens.
In one dissent she listed as one of her ten most significant decisions, Brown sought to expand the contexts in which corporations could make false or misleading statements without any effective legal mechanism for holding them accountable. In another case discussed in the report, Brown argued that a corporation should be granted an injunction against a former employee sending emails critical of the company's employment practices to some of his former colleagues. ...
Privacy, Family Rights, and Reproductive Freedom
As a state supreme court justice, Brown has issued only one opinion dealing with abortion, but it raises serious concerns about her judicial philosophy concerning women's constitutional right to privacy and reproductive freedom. In her dissent, Brown argued that the federal Constitution somehow restricts the privacy protections that may be provided by the state constitution, a position far outside the mainstream of judicial thought. She argued that the court majority's decision ruling unconstitutional a restrictive parental consent law for minors seeking abortions would allow courts to "topple every cultural icon, to dismiss all societal values, and to become final arbiters of traditional morality." ...
Worker Rights, Consumer Protection and Private Property Rights
Several cases raise serious questions about Brown's willingness to enforce provisions intended to protect the average person against the power of the government or large corporations. Brown has signaled her approval of broad drug-testing provisions even in situations in which a majority of the California Supreme Court found the tests to be clearly unconstitutional, and even where it would have required explicitly rejecting U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
...In several speeches and one of her opinions, Brown has attacked the long-established principle that governmental action infringing on fundamental rights is subject to strict judicial scrutiny while general social and economic legislation is upheld if it has a rational basis. According to Brown, that fundamental principle is "highly suspect, incoherent, and constitutionally invalid."
The one thing you will not see discussed by the Right Wing racial hucksters is Rogers Brown's judicial record. Just watch. "
Here's an example of L'il Ole Janice Rogers Brown "speechifying" and using here "cogimitation bone"...
http://www.constitution.org/col/jrb/00420_jrb_fedsoc.htm""A Whiter Shade of Pale": Sense and Nonsense —
The Pursuit of Perfection in Law and Politics
Speech of Janice Rogers Brown,
Associate Justice, California Supreme Court
The Federalist Society
University of Chicago Law School
April 20, 2000, Thursday
12:15 p.m.
Thank you. I want to thank Mr. Schlangen (fondly known as Charlie to my secretary) for extending the invitation and the Federalist Society both for giving me my first opportunity to visit the City of Chicago and for being, as Mr. Schlangen assured me in his letter of invitation, "a rare bastion (nay beacon) of conservative and libertarian thought." That latter notion made your invitation well-nigh irresistible. There are so few true conservatives left in America that we probably should be included on the endangered species list. That would serve two purposes: Demonstrating the great compassion of our government and relegating us to some remote wetlands habitat where — out of sight and out of mind — we will cease being a dissonance in collectivist concerto of the liberal body politic.
In truth, they need not banish us to the gulag. We are not much of a threat, lacking even a coherent language in which to state our premise. [I should pause here to explain the source of the title to this discussion. Unless you are a very old law student, you probably never heard of "A Whiter Shade of Pale."] "A Whiter Shade of Pale" is an old (circa 1967) Procol Harum song, full of nonsensical lyrics, but powerfully evocative nonetheless. Here's a sample:
"We skipped the light fandango
turned cartwheels cross the floor
I was feeling kinda seasick
but the crowd called out for more.
The room was humming harder
as the ceiling flew away.
When we called out for another drink
the waiter brought a tray."
There is something about this that forcibly reminds me of our current political circus. The last verse is even better.
"If music be the food of love
then laughter is its queen
and likewise if behind is in front
then dirt in truth is clean...."
Sound familiar? Of course Procol Harum had an excuse. These were the 60's after all, and the lyrics were probably drug induced. What's our excuse?
One response might be that we are living in a world where words have lost their meaning. This is certainly not a new phenomenon. It seems to be an inevitable artifact of cultural disintegration. Thucydides lamented the great changes in language and life that succeeded the Pelopennesian War; Clarendon and Burke expressed similar concerns about the political transformations of their own time. It is always a disorienting experience for a member of the old guard when the entire understanding of the old world is uprooted. As James Boyd White expresses it: "[I]n this world no one would see what he sees, respond as he responds, speak as he speaks,"1 and living in that world means surrender to the near certainty of central and fundamental changes within the self. "One cannot maintain forever one's language and judgment against the pressures of a world that works in different ways," for we are shaped by the world in which we live.2
This is a fascinating subject which we do not have time to explore more thoroughly. Suffice it to say that this phenomenon accounts for much of the near hysterical tone of current political discourse. Our problems, however, seem to go even deeper. It is not simply that the same words don't have the same meanings; in our lifetime, words are ceasing to have any meaning. The culture of the word is being extinguished by the culture of the camera. Politicians no longer have positions they have photo-ops. To be or not to be is no longer the question. The question is: how do you feel.
Writing 50 years ago, F.A. Hayek warned us that a centrally planned economy is "The Road to Serfdom."3 He was right, of course; but the intervening years have shown us that there are many other roads to serfdom. In fact, it now appears that human nature is so constituted that, as in the days of empire all roads led to Rome; in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.
It is my thesis today that the sheer tenacity of the collectivist impulse — whether you call it socialism or communism or altruism — has changed not only the meaning of our words, but the meaning of the Constitution, and the character of our people.
Government is the only enterprise in the world which expands in size when its failures increase. Aaron Wildavsky gives a credible account of this dynamic. Wildavsky notes that the Madisonian world has gone "topsy turvy" as factions, defined as groups "activated by some common interest adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community,"4 have been transformed into sectors of public policy. "Indeed," says Wildavsky, "government now pays citizens to organize, lawyers to sue, and politicians to run for office. Soon enough, if current trends continue, government will become self-contained, generating (apparently spontaneously) the forces to which it responds."5 That explains how, but not why. And certainly not why we are so comfortable with that result.
America's Constitution provided an 18th Century answer to the question of what to do about the status of the individual and the mode of government. Though the founders set out to establish good government "from reflection and choice,"6 they also acknowledged the "limits of reason as applied to constitutional design,"7 and wisely did not seek to invent the world anew on the basis of abstract principle; instead, they chose to rely on habits, customs, and principles derived from human experience and authenticated by tradition.
"The Framers understood that the self-interest which in the private sphere contributes to welfare of society — both in the sense of material well-being and in the social unity engendered by commerce — makes man a knave in the public sphere, the sphere of politics and group action. It is self-interest that leads individuals to form factions to try to expropriate the wealth of others through government and that constantly threatens social harmony."8
Collectivism sought to answer a different question: how to achieve cosmic justice — sometimes referred to as social justice — a world of social and economic equality. Such an ambitious proposal sees no limit to man's capacity to reason. It presupposes a community can consciously design not only improved political, economic, and social systems but new and improved human beings as well.
The great innovation of this millennium was equality before the law. The greatest fiasco — the attempt to guarantee equal outcomes for all people. Tom Bethell notes that the security of property — a security our Constitution sought to ensure — had to be devalued in order for collectivism to come of age. The founders viewed private property as "the guardian of every other right."9 But, "by 1890 we find Alfred Marshall, the teacher of John Maynard Keynes making the astounding claim that the need for private property reaches no deeper than the qualities of human nature."10 A hundred years later came Milton Friedman's laconic reply: " 'I would say that goes pretty deep.'"11 In between, came the reign of socialism. "Starting with the formation of the Fabian Society and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall, its ambitious project was the reformation of human nature. Intellectuals visualized a planned life without private property, mediated by the New Man."12 He never arrived. As John McGinnis persuasively argues: "There is simply a mismatch between collectivism on any large and enduring scale and our evolved nature. As Edward O. Wilson, the world's foremost expert on ants, remarked about Marxism, 'Wonderful theory. Wrong species.'"13
Ayn Rand similarly attributes the collectivist impulse to what she calls the "tribal view of man."14 She notes, "[t]he American philosophy of the Rights of Man was never fully grasped by European intellectuals. Europe's predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave to the absolute state embodied by the king, to the concept of man as the slave of the absolute state as embodied by 'the people' — i.e., switching from slavery to a tribal chieftain into slavery to the tribe."15
Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism's virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental and profound flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice — including our freedom. Revel notes that Marxism has been "shamed and ridiculed everywhere except American universities" but only after totalitarian systems "reached the limits of their wickedness."16
"Socialism concentrated all the wealth in the hands of an oligarchy in the name of social justice, reduced peoples to misery in the name of shar[ed] resources, to ignorance in the name of science. It created the modern world's most inegalitarian societies in the name of equality, the most vast network of concentration camps ever built [for] the defense of liberty."17
Revel warns: "The totalitarian mind can reappear in some new and unexpected and seemingly innocuous and indeed virtuous form. [¶]... [I]t ... will [probably] put itself forward under the cover of a generous doctrine, humanitarian, inspired by a concern for giving the disadvantaged their fair share, against corruption, and pollution, and 'exclusion.'"18
Of course, given the vision of the American Revolution just outlined, you might think none of that can happen here. I have news for you. It already has. The revolution is over. What started in the 1920's; became manifest in 1937; was consolidated in the 1960's; is now either building to a crescendo or getting ready to end with a whimper.
At this moment, it seems likely leviathan will continue to lumber along, picking up ballast and momentum, crushing everything in its path. Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.
But what if anything does this have to do with law? Quite a lot, I think. In America, the national conversation will probably always include rhetoric about the rule of law. I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country's founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document. In his famous, all too famous, dissent in Lochner, Justice Holmes wrote that the "constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire."19 Yes, one of the greatest (certainly one of the most quotable) jurists this nation has ever produced; but in this case, he was simply wrong. That Lochner dissent has troubled me — has annoyed me — for a long time and finally I understand why. It's because the framers did draft the Constitution with a surrounding sense of a particular polity in mind, one based on a definite conception of humanity. In fact as Professor Richard Epstein has said, Holmes's contention is "not true of our [ ] [Constitution], which was organized upon very explicit principles of political theory."20 It could be characterized as a plan for humanity "after the fall."
There is nothing new, of course, in the idea that the framers did not buy into the notion of human perfectibility. And the document they drafted and the nation adopted in 1789 is shot through with provisions that can only be understood against the supposition that humanity's capacity for evil and tyranny is quite as real and quite as great as its capacity for reason and altruism. Indeed, as noted earlier, in politics, the framers may have envisioned the former tendency as the stronger, especially in the wake of the country's experience under the Articles of Confederation. The fear of "factions," of an "encroaching tyranny"; the need for ambition to counter ambition"; all of these concerns identified in the Federalist Papers have stratagems designed to defend against them in the Constitution itself. We needed them, the framers were convinced, because "angels do not govern"; men do.
It was a quite opposite notion of humanity, of its fundamental nature and capacities, that animated the great concurrent event in the West in 1789 — the revolution in France. Out of that revolutionary holocaust — intellectually an improbable melding of Rousseau with Descartes — the powerful notion of abstract human rights was born. At the risk of being skewered by historians of ideas, I want to suggest that the belief in and the impulse toward human perfection, at least in the political life of a nation, is an idea whose arc can be traced from the Enlightenment, through the Terror, to Marx and Engels, to the Revolutions of 1917 and 1937. The latter date marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. All of these events were manifestations of a particularly skewed view of human nature and the nature of human reason. To the extent the Enlightenment sought to substitute the paradigm of reason for faith, custom or tradition, it failed to provide rational explanation of the significance of human life. It thus led, in a sort of ultimate irony, to the repudiation of reason and to a full-fledged flight from truth — what Revel describes as "an almost pathological indifference to the truth."21
There were obviously urgent economic and social reasons driving not only the political culture but the constitutional culture in the mid-1930's — though it was actually the mistakes of governments (closed borders, high tariffs, and other protectionist measures) that transformed a "momentary breakdown into an international cataclysm."22 The climate of opinion favoring collectivist social and political solutions had a worldwide dimension.
Politically, the belief in human perfectibility is another way of asserting that differences between the few and the many can, over time, be erased. That creed is a critical philosophical proposition underlying the New Deal. What is extraordinary is the way that thesis infiltrated and effected American constitutionalism over the next three-quarters of a century. Its effect was not simply to repudiate, both philosophically and in legal doctrine, the framers' conception of humanity, but to cut away the very ground on which the Constitution rests. Because the only way to come to terms with an enduring Constitution is to believe that the human condition is itself enduring.
For complex reasons, attempts to impose a collectivist political solution in the United States failed. But, the political failure was of little practical concern, in a way that is oddly unappreciated, that same impulse succeeded within the judiciary, especially in the federal high court. The idea of abstract rights, government entitlements as the most significant form of property, is well suited to conditions of economic distress and the emergence of a propertyless class. But the economic convulsions of the late 1920's and early 1930's passed away; the doctrinal underpinnings of West Coast Hotel and the "switch in time" did not. Indeed, over the next half century it consumed much of the classical conception of the Constitution.
So secure were the intellectual underpinnings of the constitutional revolution, so self-evident the ambient cultural values of the policy elite who administered it, that the object of the high court's jurisprudence was largely devoted to the construction of a system for ranking the constitutional weight to be given contending social interests.
In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned. A judicial subjectivity whose very purpose was to do away with objective gauges of constitutionality, with universal principles, the better to give the judicial priesthood a free hand to remake the Constitution. After a handful of gross divisions reflecting the hierarchy of the elite's political values had been drawn (personal vs. economic rights, for example), the task was to construct a theoretical system, not of social or cultural norms, but of abstract constitutional weight a given interest merits — strict or rational basis scrutiny. The rest, the identification of underlying, extraconstitutional values, consisted of judicial tropes and a fortified rhetoric.
Protection of property was a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937. The paradigmatic case, written by that premiere constitutional operative, William O. Douglas, is Williamson v. Lee Optical.23 The court drew a line between personal rights and property rights or economic interests, and applied two different constitutional tests. Rights were reordered and property acquired a second class status.24 If the right asserted was economic, the court held the Legislature could do anything it pleased. Judicial review for alleged constitutional infirmities under the due process clause was virtually nonexistent. On the other hand, if the right was personal and "fundamental," review was intolerably strict. "From the Progressive era to the New Deal, [ ] property was by degrees ostracized from the company of rights.25 Something new, called economic rights, began to supplant the old property rights. This change, which occurred with remarkably little fanfare, was staggeringly significant. With the advent of "economic rights," the original meaning of rights was effectively destroyed. These new "rights" imposed obligations, not limits, on the state.
It thus became government's job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. The words of Judge Alex Kozinski, written in 1991, are not very encouraging." 'What we have learned from the experience of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union ... is that you need capitalism to make socialism work.' In other words, capitalism must produce what socialism is to distribute."26 Are the signs and portents any better at the beginning of a new century?
Has the constitutional Zeitgeist that has reigned in the United States since the beginning of the Progressive Era come to its conclusion? And if it has, what will replace it? I wish I knew the answer to these questions. It is true — in the words of another old song: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."27
The oracles point in all directions at once. Political polls suggest voters no longer desire tax cuts. But, taxpayers who pay the largest proportion of taxes are now a minority of all voters. On the other hand, until last term the Supreme Court held out the promising possibility of a revival of what might be called Lochnerism-lite in a trio of cases — Nollan, Dolan, and Lucas, Those cases offered a principled but pragmatic means-end standard of scrutiny under the takings clause.
But there are even deeper movements afoot. Tectonic plates are shifting and the resulting cataclysm may make 1937 look tame.
Lionel Tiger, in a provocative new book called The Decline of Males, posits a brilliant and disturbing new paradigm. He notes we used to think of a family as a man, a woman, and a child. Now, a remarkable new family pattern has emerged which he labels "bureaugamy." A new trinity: a woman, a child, and a bureaucrat."28 Professor Tiger contends that most, if not all, of the gender gap that elected Bill Clinton to a second term in 1996 is explained by this phenomenon. According to Tiger, women moved in overwhelming numbers to the Democratic party as the party most likely to implement policies and programs which will support these new reproductive strategies.
Professor Tiger is not critical of these strategies. He views this trend as the triumph of reproduction over production; the triumph of Darwinism over Marxism; and he advocates broad political changes to accommodate it.
Others do not see these changes as quite so benign or culturally neutral. Jacques Barzan finds the Central Western notion of emancipation has been devalued. It has now come to mean that "nothing stands in the way of every wish."29 The result is a decadent age — an era in which "there are no clear lines of advance"; "when people accept futility and the absurd as normal[,] the culture is decadent."30
Stanley Rosen defines "our present crisis as a fatigue induced by ... accumulated decisions of so many revolutions."31 He finds us, in the spirit of Pascal, knowing "too much to be ignorant and too little to be wise."32
I will close with a story I like a lot. It's a true story. It happened on June 10, 1990. A British Airways jet bound for Malaga, Spain, took off from Birmingham, England. It was expected to be a routine flight. As the jet climbed through the 23,000-foot level, there was a loud bang; the cockpit windshield directly in front of the captain blew out. The sudden decompression sucked Captain Lancaster out of his seatbelt and into the hole left by the windscreen. A steward who happened to be in the cockpit managed to snag the captain's feet as he hurtled past. Another steward rushed onto the flight deck, strapped himself into the captain's chair and, helped by other members of the crew, clung with all his strength to the captain. The slipstream was so fierce, they were unable to drag the pilot back into the plane. His clothing was ripped from his body. With Lancaster plastered against the nose of the jet, the co-pilot donned an oxygen mask and flew the plane to Southampton —approximately 15 minutes away — and landed safely. The captain had a fractured elbow, wrist and thumb; a mild case of frostbite, but was otherwise unharmed.
We find ourselves, like the captain, in a situation that is hopeless but not yet desperate. The arcs of history, culture, philosophy, and science all seem to be converging on this temporal instant. Familiar arrangements are coming apart; valuable things are torn from our hands, snatched away by the decompression of our fragile ark of culture. But, it is too soon to despair. The collapse of the old system may be the crucible of a new vision. We must get a grip on what we can and hold on. Hold on with all the energy and imagination and ferocity we possess. Hold on even while we accept the darkness. We know not what miracles may happen; what heroic possibilities exist. We may be only moments away from a new dawn.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning (Univ. of Chicago Press 1984) p. 4.
2 Ibid.
3 F. A, Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Univ. of Chicago Press 1994).
4 Golembiewski & Wildavsky, The Cost of Federalism (1984) Bare Bones: Putting Flesh on the Skeleton of American Federalism 67, 73.
5 Ibid.
6 Hamilton, The Federalist Papers No. 1 (Rossiter ed. 1961) p. 33.
7 Michael W. Spicer, Public Administration and the Constitution: A Conflict in World Views (March 1, 1994) 24 American R. of Public Admin. 85 [1994 WL 2806423 at *10].
8 John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins (1996) 19 Harv. J.L.& Pub. Policy 251, 253.
9 Tom Bethell, Property Rights, Prosperity and 1,000 Years of Lessons, The Wall Street J. (Dec. 27, 1999) p. A19.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 John O. McGinnis, The Original Constitution and Our Origins, supra, 19 Harv. J. L.& Pub. Policy at p. 258.
14 Ayn Rand, Capitalism the Unknown Ideal (New American Lib. 1966) pp. 4-5.
15 Ibid
16 Jean Francois Revel, Democracy Against Itself (The Free Press 1993) pp. 250-251.
17 Id. at p. 251.
18 Id. at pp. 250-251.
19 (198 U.S. at p. 75.)
20 Clint Bolick, Unfinished Business (1990) p. 25, quoting Crisis in the Courts (1982) The Manhattan Report on Economic Policy, Vol. V, No. 2, p. 4.
21 Jean Francois Revel, The Flight From Truth (Random House N.Y. 1991) p. xvi.
22 Id. at p. xxxvii.
23 348 U.S. 483.
24 Tom Bethell, The Noblest Triumph (St. Martin's Griffin, N.Y. 1998) p. 175.
25 Id. at p. 176.
26 Alex Kozinski, The Dark Lesson of Utopia (1991) 58 U.Chi. L.R. 575, 576.
27 Buffalo Springfield, For What It's Worth (1966).
28 Lionel Tiger, The Decline of Males (Golden Books, N.Y. 1999) pp. 21, 27.
29 Edward Rothstein, N.Y. Times (April 15, 2000) p. A l7.
30 Ibid.
31 Stanley Rosen, Rethinking the Enlightenment (1997) 7 Common Knowledge, p. 104.
32 Ibid."
===============SNIP==============
She's a FUCKIN' NUT!
But, don't just take MY words...
Check out this page
http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/default.aspx?oid=12751
"Janice Rogers Brown On American Government
Some things are apparent. Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible. [“A Whiter Shade of Pale,” Speech to Federalist Society (April 20. 2000)(“Federalist speech” at 8]
Where government advances – and it advances relentlessly – freedom is imperiled; community impoverished; religion marginalized and civilization itself jeopardized....When did government cease to be a necessary evil and become a goody bag to solve our private problems? [“Hyphenasia: the Mercy Killing of the American Dream,” Speech at Claremont-McKenna College (Sept. 16, 1999) at 3,4]
In the last 100 years – and particularly in the last 30 – ...[g]overnment has been transformed from a necessary evil to a nanny – benign, compassionate, and wise. Sometimes transformation is a good thing. Sometimes, though, it heralds not higher ground but rather, to put a different gloss on Pat Moynihan’s memorable phrase, defining democracy down. [“Fifty Ways to Lose Your Freedom,” Speech to Institute of Justice (Aug. 12, 2000)(“IFJ speech”) at 2]
[W]e no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens. [IFJ speech at 3-4]
Government acts as a giant siphon, extracting wealth, creating privilege and power, and redistributing it. [Speech at McGeorge School of Law (Nov. 21, 1997) at 18][See also Landgate, Inc. v. California Coastal Commission, 953 P.2d 1188, 1212 (Cal. 1998)(Brown, J., dissenting)(referring to government as “relentless siphon.”)]
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Janice Rogers Brown on senior citizens and age discrimination
My grandparents’ generation thought being on the government dole was disgraceful, a blight on the family’s honor. Today’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much “free” stuff as the political system will permit them to extract...Big government is...[t]he drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers, and militant senior citizens. [IFJ speech at 2,3]
I would deny [the senior citizen] plaintiff relief because she has failed to establish the public policy against age discrimination “inures to the benefit of the public” or is “fundamental and substantial”...Discrimination based on age...does not mark its victim with a “stigma of inferiority and second class citizenship”....; it is the unavoidable consequence of that universal leveler: time [Dissenting opinion in Stevenson v. Superior Court, 941 P.2d 1157,1177, 1187 (Cal. 1997)]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the New Deal, the Great Society, and the “transmutation” of the Constitution
I have argued that collectivism was (and is) fundamentally incompatible with the vision that undergirded this country’s founding. The New Deal, however, inoculated the federal Constitution with a kind of underground collectivist mentality. The Constitution itself was transmuted into a significantly different document...1937...marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution...Politically, the belief in human perfectibility is another way of asserting that differences between the few and the many can, over time, be erased. That creed is a critical philosophical proposition underlying the New Deal. What is extraordinary is the way that thesis infiltrated and effected American constitutionalism over the next three-quarters of a century. Its effect was not simply to repudiate, both philosophically and in legal doctrine, the framers’ conception of humanity, but to cut away the very ground on which the Constitution rests... In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned [Federalist speech at 8, 10, 11, 12]
In the last 100 years – and particularly the last 30 – the Constitution, once the fixed chart of our aspirations, has been demoted to the status of a bad chain novel. [IFJ speech at2]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the proper “protection” of property
In the New Deal/Great Society era, a rule that was the polar opposite of the classical era of American law reigned...Protection of property was a major casualty of the Revolution of 1937…Rights were reordered and property acquired a second class status...It thus became government’s job not to protect property but, rather, to regulate and redistribute it. And, the epic proportions of the disaster which has befallen millions of people during the ensuing decades has not altered our fervent commitment to statism. [Federalist speech at 12, 13]
At its founding and throughout its early history, this regime revered private property. The American philosophy of the Rights of Man relied heavily on the indissoluble connection between rationality, property, freedom and justice. The Founders viewed the right of property as “the guardian of every other right”….[IFJ speech at 5]
[P]rivate property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco…I would find the HCO [San Francisco Residential Hotel Unit Conversion and Demolition Ordinance] preempted by the Ellis Act and facially unconstitutional. …Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery. Turning a democracy into a kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves; it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government. …The right to express one’s individuality and essential human dignity through the free use of property is just as important as the right to do so through speech, the press, or the free exercise of religion. [Dissenting opinion in San Remo Hotel L.P. v. City and County of San Francisco, 41 P.3d 87, 120, 128-9 (Cal. 2002)(upholding San Francisco ordinance calling on hotel owners seeking permission to eliminate residential units and convert to tourist hotels help replace lost rental units for low income, elderly, and disabled persons)][See also IFJ speech at 4 (warning that without effective limits on government, “a democracy is inevitably transformed into a Kleptocracy.”)]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the courts, law and the judiciary
We are heirs to a mind-numbing bureaucracy; subject to a level of legalization that cannot avoid being arbitrary, capricious, and discriminatory. What other outcome is possible in a society in which no adult can wake up, go about their business, and return to their homes without breaking several laws? There are of course many reasons for our present difficulties, but some of our troubles can be laid at the feet of that most innocuous branch – the judiciary…From the 1960’s onward, we have witnessed the rise of the judge militant. [Speech to California Lincoln Club Libertarian Law Council (Dec. 11, 1997)(“Libertarian speech”) at 5-6, 9]
But, alas, the decisions of such [supreme] courts, including my own, seem ever more ad hoc and expedient, perilously adrift on the roiling seas of feckless photo-op compassion and political correctness. [IFJ speech at 15]
Thus, lawyers have secured the right of topless dancers to perform, but have banished prayer from public life. They have won the right for indigents to take over public spaces, even our children’s libraries, and for the mentally ill to live on streets and shout obscenities at passersby. Legal advocates have guaranteed the right of students to be ignorant by opposing competency tests, and ignored their brazen possession and use of weapons in school. [“Politics: A Vision for Change,” Docket (Dec. 1993) at 15]
Politicians in their eagerness to please and to provide something of value to their constituencies that does not have a price tag are handing out new rights like lollipops in the dentist’s office. [Speech to Sacramento County bar Ass’n (May 1, 1996) at 6-7]
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Janice Rogers Brown on strict judicial scrutiny for violations of fundamental constitutional rights and the incorporation doctrine
[Beginning in 1937, t]he court drew a line between personal rights and property rights or economic interests, and applied two different constitutional tests…[I]f the right was personal and “fundamental,” review was intolerably strict. [Federalist speech at 12]
The dichotomy between the United States Supreme Court’s laissez-faire treatment of social and economic rights and its hypervigilance with respect to an expanding array of judicially proclaimed fundamental rights is highly suspect, incoherent, and constitutionally invalid. [Concurring opinion in Kasler v. Lockyer, 2 P.3d 581, 601 (Cal. 2000), cert. denied, 69 U.S.L.W. 3549 (2001)]
[T]he courts overcame these alleged limitations on their powers with ridiculous ease. How? By constitutionalizing everything possible, finding constitutional rights which are nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. By taking a few words which are in the Constitution like “due process” and “equal protection” and imbuing them with elaborate and highly implausible etymologies; and by enunciating standards of constitutional review which are not standards at all but rather policy vetoes, i.e., strict scrutiny and the compelling state interest standard. [Libertarian speech at 7-8]
The United States Supreme Court, however, began in the 1940s to incorporate the Bill of Rights into the 14th Amendment…The historical evidence supporting what the Supreme Court did here is pretty sketchy…The argument on the other side is pretty overwhelming that it’s probably not incorporated. [“Beyond the Abyss: Restoring Religion on the Public Square,” Speech to Pepperdine Bible Lectureship in 1999]
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Janice Rogers Brown on democracy, capitalism, socialism, and “liberalism”:
Democracy and capitalism seem to have triumphed. But, appearances can be deceiving. Instead of celebrating capitalism’s virtues, we offer it grudging acceptance, contemptuous tolerance, but only for its capacity to feed the insatiable maw of socialism. We do not conclude that socialism suffers from a fundamental flaw. We conclude instead that its ends are worthy of any sacrifice – including our freedom….1937…marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution. [Federalist speech at 6-7, 10]
In truth, liberalism’s vaunted tolerance and openness is a lie. In America, at least, liberalism is tolerant only of those concerns to which it is indifferent. To those trivialized forms of religious observance which amount to no more than a consumer preference, the culture maintains a posture of tolerance. [Speech to St. Thomas More Society (Oct. 15, 1998) at 8]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the Supreme Court’s discredited decision in Lochner v. New York
In his famous, all too famous, dissent in Lochner, Justice Holmes wrote that the “constitution is not intended to embody a particular economic theory, whether of paternalism and the organic relation of the citizen to the State or of laissez faire.” Yes, one of the greatest (certainly one of the most quotable) jurists this nation has ever produced; but in this case, he was simply wrong. [Federalist speech at 8]
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Janice Rogers Brown on the right of privacy vs. the “right to keep and bear arms”
Curiously, in the current dialectic, the right to keep and bear arms – a right expressly guaranteed by the Bill of Rights – is deemed less fundamental than implicit protections the court purports to find in the penumbras of other express provisions. (citations omitted) But surely, the right to preserve one’s life is at least as fundamental as the right to preserve one’s privacy. [Concurring opinion in Kasler, 2 P.3d at 602]
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Janice Rogers Brown on government employers requiring employees to forfeit constitutional rights
In this case and others like it involving the interests of government solely as an employer and the surrender of a constitutional right as a condition of obtaining a mere benefit or “privilege” [i.e. employment], I would argue for a return to an earlier view, pungently expressed by Justice Holmes while a member of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts: “The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.” (citations omitted) I realize, of course, that for many years Holmes’s view has been out of fashion. …However, to the extent the doctrine of unconstitutional conditions purports to hold that government may not grant a benefit on the condition that the beneficiary surrender a constitutional right, even if the government may withhold the benefit altogether, it seems more a figment of academic imagination than reality. [Concurring and dissenting opinion in Loder v. City of Glendale, 927 P.2d 1200, 1257, 1258 (1997)(striking down city across-the-board testing program for promoted employees while approving requirement for new employees)].
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Janice Rogers Brown on natural law
We continue to chip away at the foundations of our success. We dismissed natural law and morality because its unverifiable judgments were deemed inferior to reason. But, then, we drove reason itself from the camp because the most significant of life’s questions defy empiricism. …Only natural law offers an alternative to might makes right and accounts for man’s “unrelenting quest to rise above the ‘letter of the law’ to the realm of the spirit.” [IFJ speech at 15, 17] "
Many black civil rights groups and worker's unions such as the AFL/CIO strongly oppose this asshole!
http://www.aflcio.org/issuespolitics/rogers_brown.cfm"Oppose the Nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit
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Janice Rogers Brown is an associate justice on the California Supreme Court, a position she has held since 1996. On July 25, 2003, President Bush nominated Justice Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Brown’s nomination should be defeated. She is an extreme conservative who is incapable of keeping her personal and political ideology out of her decision making. Brown’s views are extreme, and if adopted, would seriously undermine civil rights, women’s rights, worker and consumer protections and the environment.
Brown’s speeches and opinions show that she takes an extremely narrow view of the role of government in improving people’s lives and an extremely protective view of private property rights. In one speech, Brown described the Supreme Court’s decisions upholding New Deal legislation such as minimum wage laws as “the triumph of our own socialist revolution.” She compares “big government” to “slavery” and an “opiate.” She goes so far as to say that “[t]oday’s senior citizens blithely cannibalize their grandchildren because they have a right to get as much ‘free’ stuff as the political system will permit them to extract.”[1]
In another speech, she states her view of government as follows:
Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit.[2]
The American Bar Association has given Justice Brown its lowest possible passing grade—a “qualified/not qualified” rating. When Brown was nominated to the California Supreme Court, three-fourths of the California State Bar’s Commission on Judicial Nominees rated her “unqualified” for the position because of her lack of experience and her tendency to inject her own personal views into her judicial opinions.[3] In her seven years on the California Supreme Court, Brown has demonstrated that her critics were right.
Examples of how Janice Rogers Brown’s troubling and extreme views have made their way into her decisions on the California Supreme Court include:
Banning Affirmative Action. Brown authored an opinion that effectively ended meaningful affirmative action in California. Hi-Voltage Wire Works, Inc. v. City of Jan Jose, 12 P.3d 1068 (2000). Brown’s opinion was severely criticized, both on and off the court, for its harsh rhetoric and its suggestion that affirmative action resembled racist and segregationist laws that predated landmark civil rights laws.
Denying Effective Remedies to Victims of Unlawful Discrimination. Brown would have barred administrative agencies from awarding compensatory damages for emotional distress in race discrimination cases. Konig v. Fair Employment and Housing Comm’n, 50 P.3d 718 (2002). While couching her decision in separations of powers language, Brown disparaged administrative agencies and implicitly questioned their ability to fairly assess damages, saying that “administrative agencies [are] not immune to political influences, [and] they are subject to capture by a specialized constituency.” 50 P.3d at 732. Brown was the only justice to take this position. And in Aguilar v. Avis Rent-a-Car, 980 P.2d 846 (1999), Brown authored a dissenting opinion that would have struck down, on First Amendment grounds, an injunction that instructed a supervisor not to use racial epithets against Latino employees. The injunction was issued by a trial court judge after the employer was found liable by a jury for maintaining a discriminatory hostile work environment for Latino employees.
Barring Civil Rights Claims. Brown dissented in a civil rights case and said the plaintiff’s race and age bias claims should have been thrown out as preempted by federal banking law. Peatros v. Bank of America, 990 P.2d 539 (2000).
Allowing Mandatory Arbitration Agreements Even If Employees Must Pay for the Cost of Arbitration. Brown authored an opinion saying that she would allow employers to require employees to agree to compulsory arbitration of employment claims (such as discrimination claims or unpaid overtime claims) even if those agreements allowed arbitrators to impose some or all of the cost of the arbitration on the employee. Armendariz v. Foundation Health Psychcare Servs., 6 P.3d 669 (2000). The majority of the court ruled that a mandatory arbitration agreement containing such a provision would be invalid, because it would discourage employees from exercising their right to bring claims against their employers.
Protecting Private Property Rights at the Expense of Affordable Housing Measures. Brown dissented from a decision that upheld the City of San Francisco’s determination that the owner of a residence hotel needed to retain affordable housing or contribute to an affordable housing fund as a condition of converting its property to a tourist hotel. Brown wrote a sarcastic and blistering dissent, calling the city’s decision “theft,” “extortion” and an unconstitutional “taking” of the hotel owner’s private property. San Remo Hotel v. City and County of San Francisco, 41 P.3d 87 (2002). Brown’s opinion shows that she is skeptical of government action when it impacts private property rights—a view which, if adopted, would put at risk many consumer, environmental and worker protection measures.
Protecting Private Property Owners from Expressive Activity on their Property. Brown authored an opinion that took a narrow view of the California Constitution’s free speech protections, imposing a “state action” requirement as a condition of those protections, even though such a requirement does not appear in the language of the California Constitution. As a result, tenants in a huge residential apartment complex were barred from distributing a tenant newsletter to their neighbors. Golden Gateway Center v. Golden Gateway Tenants Ass’n, 29 P.3d 797 (2001). Employers are now using the decision to try to keep union organizers away from their workplaces.
Chilling E-mail Communication with Employees. Brown dissented from a ruling that a company could not sue an ex-employee under the tort of trespass after the ex-employee sent e-mails critical of the company to his former co-workers. The court majority said the company could not sue because there had been no actual damage or disruption to the company’s e-mail system. Brown would have allowed the lawsuit even in the absence of such damage. Intel Corp. v. Hamidi, 71 P.3d 296 (2003). Had Brown’s view been adopted, companies throughout California could have used trespass laws to shut down group e-mail contact from outside individuals or organizations.
Denying Schoolteachers Timely Information About Their Employment Status. In Kavanaugh v. West Sonoma County Union High School, 62 P.3d 54 (2003), Brown authored a dissent that would have allowed school districts to notify teachers of their status well after they began work, meaning that new hires could be subjected to “bait-and-switch” tactics by school employers. The court majority ruled that applicable statutes require school districts to notify teachers of their status (e.g., temporary, probationary, etc.) on their first day of work. Knowledge of this status is important because different categories of teachers have different levels of job security.
Undermining Health and Safety Protections. Prior to joining the California Supreme Court, Brown served on the California Court of Appeal. There, she authored an opinion that would have invalidated a state law that required paint companies to help pay for screening and treatment of children exposed to lead paint. Brown’s opinion was later overturned by the California Supreme Court. Sinclair Paint Co. v. Board of Equalization, 49 Cal. App. 4th 127 (1996), rev’d, 937 P.2d 1350 (1997).
The D.C. Circuit Needs Balance, Not Extremist Judges Like Janice Rogers Brown
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit is widely regarded as the second most important court in America, second only to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court is a stepping-stone to the U.S. Supreme Court—the D.C. Circuit has produced more justices to the U.S. Supreme Court than any other circuit court.
The D.C. Circuit is the administrative law court. It is the court that most closely oversees the actions of federal agencies that are responsible for worker protections, environmental protections, consumer safeguards, civil rights protections and much more. And because the Supreme Court grants review of so few lower court decisions, the D.C. Circuit is often the final word on the legality of federal agency actions.
In 1999, Senate Republicans prevented Democratic appointees from gaining a majority on the D.C. Circuit when they blocked two highly-qualified nominees, including a nominee who is now the Dean of Harvard Law School, on grounds that the D.C. Circuit’s workload did not justify any additional judges. Since that time, the D.C. Circuit’s caseload has dropped by 28 percent.
When the Bush administration took office, there were four Republican appointees, four Democratic appointees and four vacancies on the D.C. Circuit. Rather than reaching out to senators from both parties to find mainstream nominees who would win easy approval, the White House has chosen extreme conservatives for these seats.
The White House is engaged in court-packing. The Bush administration wants to put an ultra-conservative imprint on the D.C. Circuit. If they succeed, the effects on civil rights, workers’ rights, women’s rights, consumer rights and the environment will be felt for decades to come.
Snubbing Local Talent to Nominate an Ideologue
The District of Columbia is home to an incredible wealth of legal talent. Rather than choosing from these ranks to fill a seat on the D.C. Circuit, President Bush has chosen a nominee from 3,000 miles away with no connection to the District of Columbia. Never before has a judge for the D.C. Circuit been imported from such a distance.
Nor does Janice Rogers Brown have any particular experience with the federal administrative law that makes up the bulk of the D.C. Circuit’s caseload. Her experience is exclusively in California agencies and California courts.
Brown’s lack of relevant connections or experience make clear that President Bush nominated Janice Rogers Brown not because she holds any unique qualifications for this seat, but because she is an extreme conservative who will tip the balance of the D.C. Circuit further to the right. Her nomination should be rejected, and senators should insist that the president nominate a more mainstream candidate for this important lifetime appointment."