Go Judge Brown!

 David Alan Black 

The lynching has begun. Yesterday, federal appellate nominee Janice Rogers Brown defended her work as a conservative California jurist and said the personal opinions expressed in her speeches would stay separate from her role on the bench.

Brown is the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper and the first African American woman to be appointed to the California Supreme Court. She was elevated to the bench by former Gov. Pete Wilson in 1996. Thomas Sowell has defended Brown, noting that left wingers and black racists are out to lynch her, or at least to derail her appointment. 

Here’s what the fuss is all about. Brown supports the U.S. Constitution. She supports limits on abortion rights. She opposes affirmative action, calling affirmative action programs “entitlement based on group representation.” “Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies,” she was quoted as saying during yesterday’s hearing. “The quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy is understandable,” she wrote in one of her opinions, where she dissented from a majority decision, adding: “There is only one problem with this approach. We are a court.”

Ah, music to my ears.

During the hearing, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) commented, “You have described the year 1937—the year in which President Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation started taking effect—as ‘the triumph of our socialist revolution’.”

Truer words were never spoken.

Brown defended herself, disputing the charge of intemperance. “I may speak in a very straightforward way, a very candid way, and sometimes I’m passionate about what I believe in,” Brown said. “But often I am talking about the Constitution, and what is being reflected in those speeches is that I am passionately devoted to the ideals on which I think this country is founded.”

Amen and amen!

My friends, Brown’s lynching is simply a reflection of the movement among social activists to wrest legislative power from the Congress and give that power to the courts. Recently we have seen several examples of the Supreme Court overstepping its bounds and rendering judgment with the force of law. In such cases, the Court is not interpreting the law but actually enacting it by fiat. The case of Roe v. Wade was just such a judicial fiat.

Brown seems to understand this. She seems to be willing to abide by the Constitution, which specifically ordains a balance of powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. She seems to be willing to forego turning the bench into a political soapbox and changing the laws to suit her own social and political beliefs. I say, let’s hear her out.

The Bible says, “Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering” (Heb. 10:23). In other words, get back to the basics and stay there!

The Republican Party is becoming more and more the party of Christian social thinkers. There are many people in this nation who are true conservatives, who respect the traditional values of this country and the Constitution. They are not the problem; they are the solution. The only threat Judge Brown represents is to those Democrats and Republicans who hold liberal and socialist views that are contrary to the general welfare and historical greatness of this nation.

May her tribe increase.

October 23, 2003

David Alan Black is the editor of www.daveblackonline.com. He is currently finishing his latest book, Why I Stopped Listening to Rush: Confessions of a Recovering Neocon.

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