Documented Rove-Owen connection shows real reason for pushing Bush judicial nominees
Fri Apr 29, 2005 at 11:49:12 AM PDT
[From the diaries -- Hunter]
I recently wrote a diary connecting the Texas shenanigans of Tom DeLay and Karl Rove with the current White House effort to push through conservative judges. I posited that the Christian Right is just the cover story with the real agenda being to support big business. (link) Little did I know at the time that there is a documented connection between Rove and Priscilla Owen that proved my case. From the November/December 2003 issue of Mother Jones (link):
Long before he took on the moniker of "Bush's brain," Rove realized he could energize the legal and medical establishments by targeting the once-sleepy Texas Supreme Court elections. "Karl has always had the requisite skills, but the proving ground came in the late 1980s and early 1990s," said Kim Ross, a former chief lobbyist for the Texas Medical Association, who worked closely with Rove. "Karl was talking about how business and medicine had to pull this together on the tort thing."
The conflicts this created were on full display in the case of Priscilla Owen, now a Bush nominee to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. When she first decided in the early 1990s that she wanted to run for a spot on the Texas Supreme Court, she called on Ralph Wayne, president of the Texas Civil Justice League, a trade group formed by the state's manufacturing, transportation, and energy industries. "I said, 'Have you talked to Karl Rove?'" Wayne remembers. "She said, 'No, but I think I should.'"
After Rove met with Wayne and Owen, he signed on, giving the candidate the seal of approval from the state's corporate establishment. The money followed. Owen raised $1.1 million for her successful 1994 state Supreme Court campaign, with a record 21 percent coming directly from the business community and much more coming from corporate defense lawyers. Judge Owen later repaid the favor, in part, by lending her endorsement to a Texas Civil Justice League fundraising appeal.
Scherer also made other insightful observations that we should be talking about. For one thing, Circuit court judges rarely do anything that would affect the Christian Right hot button issues, but they do make lots of rulings on business-related cases:
Big money, however, cares a great deal about who sits on the nation's 13 federal circuit courts.... circuit courts are the final venue for 99 percent of federal cases and most regulatory challenges. These courts, which operate in relative media obscurity, are not likely to make final decisions about high-profile social issues, such as gay marriage or the death penalty, which end up at the Supreme Court. Rather, they set precedent on issues affecting business such as media-ownership rules, sport-utility rollover lawsuits, or the rights of coal-mining companies to dump waste in thousands of miles of streambed in West Virginia. "There are many cases in which a circuit court nominee's views matter, but abortion is not one of them," says Alan Morrison, who leads Public Citizen's litigation group. "There are just a hundred different ways by which the courts of appeals judges can by little cuts kill plaintiffs."
Scherer made another important point that seems obvious in retrospect but no one has been talking about it. The GOP set themselves up to be able to push big-business friendly judges by stalling the Clinton nominees, the very sort of thing they now accuse Democrats of doing:
Years of delaying President Clinton's nominees to these same courts left the Bush administration, and the business community, with a golden opportunity: All but two of the nation's 13 federal circuits -- evenly divided between Democratic and Republican appointees under Clinton -- could have Republican majorities by the next election. "With this four-year crop, it's really going to be a different judiciary than it is now," says Eldie Acheson, who led judge selection for Clinton's Justice Department.
The stated goal of many of these business groups is not a modest one: to chip away at more than 60 years of legal history, dismantle federal social services, and effectively erase the policies of the Franklin Roosevelt era. "We've been living since the New Deal with an essentially unconstitutional government," says Roger Pilon, director of the Cen- ter for Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute. The new generation of young conservative and libertarian lawyers being elevated to federal courts, he adds, "are not afraid to say that."
In addition, Scherer documents the covert support of big business for Bush judicial nominees:
....major corporations -- Home Depot, Wal-Mart, and the insurance giant AIG, to name a few -- have spent more than $100 million through front groups to remake courts that have long been a refuge for wronged consumers and employees. By targeting incumbent judges, they have tilted state supreme courts to pro-business majorities and ousted aggressive attorneys general. At the same time, corporate lobbyists have blitzed state legislators with tort-reform proposals, overseeing the passage of new laws in 24 states over the past year alone.
Now, with a sympathetic ear in the White House, corporate America is taking its legal agenda to the federal bench with a behind-the-scenes campaign of high-powered lobbying and interest-group advertising....Several of President Bush's nominees to federal appeals and district courts owe their careers to the support of the insurance, retail, and energy industries that got them elected on the state level.
The nominees'... promotion to the federal bench coincides with an ambitious corporate legislative agenda, backed by more than 475 lobbyists, that seeks to force limits on jury awards and move lawsuits out of state courts, where judges historically have favored plaintiffs. In Congress, the House Majority Leader, Rep. Tom DeLay, has formed a working group on "judicial accountability" to push for the approval of the president's nominees and launch investigations of liberal federal judges. "What you have is a wholesale effort to hijack the federal judiciary," says Senator Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat and former corporate defense lawyer. "They clearly want to put in a more conservative judiciary and then start stacking the deck by removing more and more cases to the federal courts."
And since Scherer wrote his article, the covert support of big business for judicial nominees has not lessened. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is the largest financial backer of the Committee for Justice, a group formed two years ago specifically to promote Bush's nominees. And the National Association of Manufacturers, under the new leadership of former Michigan Gov. John Engler (R), announced in January plans for a multimillion-dollar push to support Bush's judges. (link)
"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" said the pretend Wizard of Oz when Toto yanked down the curtain that hid him from view. Now the curtain has been yanked down to show the real driving motive for and the real financial backers of the Bush judicial nominees. And religion has little to do with it, except as a cover story.
