A Price Too High: How Democrats and Leftist Interest Groups Destroy Reputations to Keep the Courts Liberal

From City Journal:

Mention the name Charles Pickering to anyone but the most committed news junkie, and you’re apt to get a blank look or, at best, one of dim recognition. In the era of the 24-hour news cycle aimed at the ever-shortening attention span, the bitter Senate battles over the federal judiciary in which Pickering played so dramatic a part a few years back can seem like ancient history.

But with the publication of A Price Too High, Pickering’s insider account of the nearly four years he spent in limbo as a nominee to the federal bench, as Democrats and their press enablers trashed his record and reputation, we’re reminded of how extraordinarily much is at stake in the ongoing battle for control of the nation’s courts; and how far one side, at least, is willing to go to win the battle. Liberals are no longer even coy about using the courts to achieve social engineering ends that they cannot get through democratic means. “Environmentalists, prison reformers and consumer advocates have learned that what can’t be won in the legislature or executive may be achievable in a federal district court where a sympathetic judge sits,” liberal Wise Man Joe Califano wrote in a 2001 Washington Post editorial. Nan Aron, president of the liberal activist group Alliance for Justice, put it even more baldly during a debate at the Federalist Society, noting: “We have to look to the courts to create new rights we won’t be able to get from the legislature.”

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... If ever there was a poster boy for the kind of judge that Senate Democrats and their left-of-center, activist allies will fight to the political death to keep off the bench—the better to install judges who share their social agenda—it comes in the unlikely person of this gracious grandfather of 21. More dramatically than any confirmation battle in memory, the Pickering case demonstrates that liberals will seemingly say anything—and tarnish even the most sterling character—to keep control of the nation’s courts.

Of course, cynics see this as merely part of the game. Politics, they’ll say, ain’t beanbag, and weren’t many Clinton nominees to the federal bench similarly done in by Republicans? No, not really—never with the same degree of ruthlessness. Indeed, evidence of the campaign of character assassination perpetrated against Charles Pickering is just a click away: search the terms “Pickering” and “racist” in Nexis and you get more than 600 hits. Under any circumstances, a false racism charge, made for obviously political reasons, would be unacceptable. In Pickering’s case, it was worse than that. For in civil rights–era Mississippi, when courage among whites was at a premium, he was nothing short of heroic: the sort of person whom, were he not on the wrong side of the political spectrum, liberals would embrace as a moral exemplar.

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A genial man, with the mellifluous speech and courtly manner that many of us in the North know more from movies than from real life, Pickering hardens slightly when he speaks of some of his senatorial inquisitors. “They just depersonalize you,” he says. “They look at you and don’t even see a human being.” He pauses. “I must tell you, some of these people have basically the same attitude that the Klan used to have—that their ends are so important that any means are justified to accomplish them.”

... Among the main villains is Senator Charles Schumer, who, after initially pledging to support the nomination, became one of its most aggressive foes, playing the race card with what often seemed like relish. But the book’s true bad guys are the activists from the leading left-liberal special-interest groups, who called the shots while prominent Democrats did their bidding with almost comic alacrity. Of these, Ralph Neas of People for the American Way (PFAW) proved the most damaging. “People for the American Way gave the marching orders,” says Pickering. “They wrote the script and everyone else followed.”

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(emphasis added)