The first sentence of this morning’s AP report on Janice Rogers Brown had a terribly familiar ring to it.
Janice Rogers Brown, a sharecropper’s daughter who became the first black and most conservative justice on California’s Supreme Court, is a model jurist for U.S. Senate Republicans fighting judicial filibusters.
Swing by Google News are you’ll see there’s been over 200 articles published in just the last month that note Brown’s sharecropper lineage.
Note to media: we get it.
Further note to the media: it has NOTHING to do with whether she is qualified to serve a lifetime on the bench to deconstruct everything that the New Deal and liberals created FOR her, which gave her the boost to overcome her “chains” and have the OPPORTUNITY to acheive the success she has enjoyed.
Think about it: Social Security allowed her parents to have a humane standard of living (thanks FDR and the New Deal).
Think about it: Her parents had their right to vote guaranteed by the Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 (thanks LBJ and the Great Society).
Think about it: affirmative action, rights of the criminally accused, privacy rights for birth control, approval of the right to organize in labor unions, worker safety laws, family and medical leave, PUBLIC FUNDING FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS (including at the graduate level), protection of the environment, protection of drugs and the food supply, minimum wage and hour laws, …. [Michael Moore on his website during the 2004 Campaign had a great rant on what today’s conservatives enjoy that, if they had any intellectual honesty and integrity, they would be thanking liberals for every day — sorry, I don’t have the link]
The list goes on and on and on. The great and vast middle class was created and made possible by ideas and movements and struggles that the conservatives have resisted since the time of fiefdoms and humans as chattels (where do you think the idea of “master and servant” came from — right, the Bible, in both the Old Testament AND the New Testament). It was liberals that won the Civil War; that overcame the robber barons; that overcame the stupidity of Prohibition and the denial of voting rights to women and African-Americans; that won World Wars I and II and the Cold War (please, keep your “Ronnie Ray-Gun” crap to yourself and instead go read the real history books); that won the election of 2000 until ACTIVISTS on the U.S. Supreme Court gave it to our new “King George”.
And just like the liberals that created our country in the latter part of the 18th Century by overthrowing that despot known as King George III, today’s 21st Century liberals will overthrow this King George and his minions, too.
As the son of Mexican-American sharecroppers (and a life-long Democrat), I can tell you that my parents’ years laboring away under the hot sun in the fields defined the rest of their lives. Although my Dad went on to be a systems engineer and my Mother a technical editor, their sharecropper experience was always a part of their psyche.
So what if the media keeps mentioning the fact that Justice Brown is a sharecropper’s daughter? Big deal.
The issue is and should be focused on that she is not acceptable for the federal bench with her extreme views.
As the son of Mexican-American sharecroppers (and a life-long Democrat), I can tell you that my parents’ years laboring away under the hot sun in the fields defined the rest of their lives.
I completely understand and respect that. My concern is that the media keeps referencing the background of Judge Brown’s parents as if it has a direct relevance to her qualifications for the bench. I don’t believe it does.
The issue is and should be focused on that she is not acceptable for the federal bench with her extreme views.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s why it’s frustrating to see the national AP article on Brown’s nomination mention her parents in the first sentence.
Here’s what I’m sending to my local paper. Much of the info was taken from Carpetbagger’s post on April 29th.
The inference is quiet yet targeted. “The Democrats must be racists to oppose the judicial nomination of Janice Brown. What do they have against this ‘sharecropper’s daughter?’� For starters, she’s what conservatives call an “activist judge.� In a number of cases, Justice Brown has tried to reverse long-standing California state law, including that which protects whistleblowers from retaliation by their employers and consumers from corporate fraud. In other cases, Justice Brown condemned and tried to evade U.S. Supreme Court precedent. When nominated to the California Supreme Court in 1996, Justice Brown received a “not qualified� rating from the California Judicial Commission. Among other things, the Commission cited a “tendency to interject her political and philosophical views into her opinions.� So, to be clear; when Democrats oppose the nomination of Justice Janice Brown, they aren’t looking at her skin; they’re looking at her judicial record.
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