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Outside View: An unjust process

By PAUL M. WEYRICH, A UPI Outside view commentary

WASHINGTON, Sept. 15 (UPI) -- The Senate Judiciary Committee's "Gang of Ten" has just pulled the bench out from under another jurist qualified to sit on it. Their vote against sending the nomination of Texas state Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen to the floor of the U.S. Senate broke along partisan lines: 10 to 9 and they are already angling to get their next victim.

He will be Miquel Estrada, a well-qualified attorney of Hispanic ancestry whose resume reads like a modern version of a Horatio Alger story.

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Here's what President George W. Bush had to say about his nominee when speaking on Aug. 23 to a group of new American citizens: "He's a young guy. He came to our country as a teenager. He barely spoke English. He had trouble with the language, because he didn't spend any time learning the language. And he got here, and he worked hard, and as a result of a good brain, a brilliant mind, he now has argued 15 cases before the United States Supreme Court. I've named him to a high bench, but the Senate won't give him a hearing."

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"Here's a kid who comes to our country, works hard, learns the language. He's a brilliant jurist. He can't even get a hearing. I nominated him over a year and a half ago. I want this man to serve as a bright example of what is possible in America. He'll be a great judge, and the Senate needs to act," the president said.

Estrada is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, a former law clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, and served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney before serving as Assistant to the Solicitor General of the United States.

The 10 Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee's are likely to give Estrada a hearing, but it appears that he will suffer the same fate of Justice Owen. She had a sterling recommendation from the American Bar Association and the presidents, past and present, of its state chapter in Texas, only to run afoul of liberal special interest groups based in Washington.

The smear campaign is already starting against Estrada as it has against several previous nominees. The principal objection the Democrats have to them is that they have a commitment to following the law as written and relying on past precedent.

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Estrada, like Justice Owen before him, believes that judges should interpret the law not make it. He believes the Constitution means what it says and what the Founding Fathers intended it to mean. He does not buy the nonsense that the Constitution is a living document subject to the political correctness of our time.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is doing everything within its power to stop nominees like Owen and Estrada from being seated on the U.S. Court of Appeals, which handles 80 percent of all cases that go to a higher court. The committee has been as slow as molasses when it comes to giving appellate nominees a hearing. And they have taken the almost unprecedented step of denying qualified nominees the opportunity to allow the full Senate to vote on their nomination.

Even though President Bush has nominated over 120 candidates for federal judgeships, only 73 have been confirmed. Compared to the confirmation rates of judicial nominees enjoyed by his immediate predecessors during their first two years in office, the low percentage of confirmations of President Bush's is particularly striking.

Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush had well over 90 percent of their judicial nominees confirmed. President Bill Clinton had 86 percent confirmed.

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Voters often say their vote does not matter. Many will say that this year as the mid-term election approaches. But what is happening in the Senate Judiciary Committee demonstrates the power of a single vote.

A single vote constitutes the majority in the U.S. Senate and that majority not only has refused to confirm many of President Bush's judicial nominees, but has also refused to act on some 100 bills passed by the United States House.

Miquel Estrada deserves better than to be subjected to the smear tactics employed by the liberal special interest groups. But given the numbers as they are in the Senate, the odds are that he will meet the same fate as Justice Owen. The majority party in the Senate may carry the day. But it is worth asking what will the impact on our country's system of justice be over time if qualified, impartial judges are not able to sit on the Federal bench just because they are committed to following the law?

(Paul M. Weyrich is President of the Free Congress Foundation, a conservative research and education foundation located in Washington, D.C.)


-- "Outside View" commentaries are written for UPI by outside writers who specialize in a variety of important global issues.

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