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Monday, May 12, 2003
Good Bob Herbert column about Bush's judicial nominees. The choice bit is at the end:

Senator Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York who is on the Judiciary Committee, has been trying (along with many others) to sound the alarm about the succession of ideologues and extremists that the president has been attempting to install in the courts. During an interview last week, he discussed several "troubling" nominations, including that of James Leon Holmes to a federal judgeship in Arkansas.

Mr. Holmes has a problem with women. He doesn't see them as equals. "The wife is to subordinate herself to her husband," he has written. The woman, in Mr. Holmes's view, "is to place herself under the authority of the man."

Those who adopt the "feminist principle" of the equality of the sexes, he has said, "are contributing to the culture of death."

Mr. Holmes, a lawyer, is an absolute opponent of abortion, even in cases of rape. He once said that "conception from rape occurs with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami."

He has since expressed regret for that remark.

"Even assuming they want to nominate conservative Republicans," said Senator Schumer, "can't they do better than these nominations? This president has selected judges through an ideological prism to a far greater extent than any other president in history."


"Contributing to the culture of death"? Yikes. Schumer actually sounds a lot more rational than anyone else I've heard in this debate, and makes a very, very good point that would seem to override the administration's high-minded rhetoric.

Then again, Neal Pollack alerts us to some other troubling nominees.