Liberals try to nitpick Pickering

0 Comments | Insight on the News, March 11, 2002 | by Mona Charen

One certainly can understand why newspapers such as the Atlanta Journal and Constitution ("Extremist Judge Unfit to Sit on Appeals Court") and the Los Angeles Times ("Say No to This Throwback") are so upset about Charles Pickering, President George W. Bush's nominee for the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. After all, the man once testified as a character witness for the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).

What's that, you respond? He testified against the grand wizard, not for? In Mississippi? In 19677 Putting himself at political and personal risk? Oh. You say he was a local prosecutor who lost his bid for re-election because he stood up to the Klan? Hmmm.

You say this man Pickering, who has been a federal judge for 11 years, was asked by Mississippi's governor to serve on the executive committee of the Institute of Racial Reconciliation at Ole Miss? What? He was the one who urged the state's governor and the chancellor of the university to create the institute in the first place?

Who's been feeding you this stuff? James Charles Evers? You mean the brother of slain civil-rights hero Medgar Evers? He's defending this "extremist" in the pages of the Wall Street Journal? Hmmm.

People for the American Way (PFAW), the Alliance for Justice and other members in good standing of the character-assassination coalition have been faxing false accusations about Pickering far and wide. Some of those faxes landed on Evers' desk. Evers, who has known Pickering for decades, was "saddened and appalled to read many of the allegations that have been put forth about Judge Pickering ... made by groups with a Washington, D.C., address and a political agenda" and without real knowledge of "Pickering's long and distinguished record on civil rights."

Evers notes that Pickering did more than face down the Klan. While in private practice, he defended an African-American man accused of robbing a white 16-year-old at knifepoint. After two trials, the man was acquitted.

PFAW is making much of a 1990 denial by Pickering that he ever had contact with the racist Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. PFAW has uncovered a phone call with a commission staffer dating to 1972. But that phone call dealt with Pickering's concern over a labor dispute in Jones County, Miss. According to reporting by National Review's Byron York, the KKK had been making trouble and Picketing, then a state senator representing Jones County, was keeping tabs on the situation. That one phone call is the entirety of Pickering's "contact" with the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission.

As a federal judge, Pickering once overturned a damage award in a civil case because he believed that the jury was biased against the plaintiffs, an interracial couple. He ordered that the matter of damages be retried and the award for the couple thus was increased.

Well, say liberal activists, Pickering joined a law firm where one of the partners was a former segregationist. How many Southern law firms in the 1970s did not contain former segregationists? The U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate both contain or have contained not just former segregationists but former members of the KKK. The key term is "former." Besides, we are talking here of a law partner, not Pickering himself, who never was a segregationist.

The very worst the mudslingers on the left could find about the fellow was a 1959 law-review article in which Pickering pointed out the poor wording of an antimiscegenation statute. The 21-year-old Pickering did not, in the article, make the case against the law.

But in a four-decade career in law, Pickering has shown himself to be an eminently fair and reasonable jurist.

He has recommended to some convicted felons that all was not lost; that they still might turn their lives around by participating in Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship ministry. Oops, another red flag. PFAW says this is evidence of Pickering's "disregard for the separation of church and state."

This attack on Pickering is so obviously malicious and in such bad faith that one wonders why anyone takes these liberal groups seriously anymore. They have cried wolf so many times about so many honorable men and women that they have brought shame on themselves. They have become the thing they claim to detest: McCarthyites.

MONA CHAREN IS A SYNDICATED COLUMNIST AND POLITICAL ANALYST LIVING IN THE WASHINGTON AREA AND IS A FREQUENT GUEST ON RADIO AND TELEVISION PUBLIC-AFFAIRS PROGRAMS.