:: Running from the Thought Police ::

:: Saturday, February 19, 2005 ::

I Need To Read The Nation More Often

I just ran across an article heaping praise upon our own Senator Durbin.

When Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, perhaps George Bush's most corporately compromised judicial nominee, appeared early in 2003 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the most devastating line of questioning she faced did not come from one of the big-name inquisitors on a committee that includes a Kennedy, a Biden and a Leahy. Rather, Owen was taken down by a mild-mannered Midwesterner with a flair for discovering and exploiting the weaknesses of the Bush Administration and its judicial nominees. Could Owen identify any opinion she had ever written, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin inquired, "that was politically unpopular with the established power structure in Texas?" As Owen first asked Durbin to explain what he meant by "established power structure," and then stumbled through a non-answer that ended with her grumbling about political correctness, you could hear the wheels falling off the bandwagon the Administration had tried to create to win approval for their nominee. Even conservative Democratic senators recognized that they were dealing with a conservative judicial activist whose elevation to the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit would pose a genuine threat to justice in the Deep South, and joined a filibuster that ultimately led to the withdrawal of Owen's nomination.

How did Durbin know that Owen could not answer even the most basic questions about her subservience to political and economic special interests? Because, to a greater extent than any other senator, he has taken seriously the fight against Bush's most troubling judicial picks: carefully targeting the worst of them, mastering their records and developing lines of questioning meant to illustrate to other Democrats the necessity of rejecting them. "He doesn't just try to score points," says Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, the coalition of progressive groups that has been at the forefront of challenges to the Administration's strategy for reshaping the nation's courts. "He zeroes in on the issues that matter most and then he just starts demanding answers."

This guy needs to be reelected in 2008.

...Speaking of Illinois senators, I've heard comments that "people won't like Obama so much when they find out how liberal he is." This is faulty in three respects. First, this is the state that sends Durbin, who has one of the most progressive voting records in congress, to the senate. Secondly, the opposite arguement, "(liberal) people won't like Obama once he has to cast a few votes," is occasionally heard on Daily Kos. Lastly, most people voted for Obama not because he was liberal or moderate, but because he wasn't certifiably insane.

:: The Squire 8:29 PM :: email this post :: ::
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