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Priscilla owens takes enron halliburton money { May 18 2005 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/05/18/MNGIHCQRS11.DTLhttp://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/05/18/MNGIHCQRS11.DTL
2 women at the heart of debate
- Bob Egelko, Chronicle Staff Writer
Wednesday, May 18, 2005
California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown is the most conservative member of a court with a 6-1 Republican majority. Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen is one of the most conservative voices on a court whose nine members are Republicans.
The two women soon might share another distinction: as the judges whose nominations to federal appeals courts were used by Republican leaders to outlaw Senate filibusters on judicial appointments and effectively end minority party influence over them.
At least seven appeals court nominees are at stake immediately, along with President Bush's choices for future Supreme Court vacancies. But Brown and Owen have been selected as test cases in an attempt to change rules to end filibusters on judicial nominees and allow the judges to be confirmed. Currently, a vote to end a filibuster requires 60 senators' approval. The new rules would require only a simple majority.
The maneuver has been dubbed the "nuclear option.'' It's a particularly odd label to apply to the 56-year-old Brown, who is described by friends as soft-spoken and unassuming and who seldom speaks, and almost never raises her voice, at court hearings.
But Brown is anything but quiet in her written opinions, which in ringing tones have denounced affirmative action as akin to segregation, have declared private property to be "entirely extinct in San Francisco'' and have referred to her colleagues as "philosopher kings'' for overturning a state law requiring parental consent for minors' abortions.
In speeches to conservative groups, she has described a 1937 U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding New Deal economic regulation as "the triumph of our own socialist revolution''; has declared that when government moves in, "the result is families under siege, war in the streets ... and the triumph of deceit"; and has said senior citizens "blithely cannibalize their grandchildren'' for government benefits.
Opponents say Brown's condemnation of government is especially troubling because the court to which she has been nominated by Bush, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., hears more cases involving federal regulations than any other. In the past, it has also been a proving ground for future Supreme Court nominees.
Supporters stress other aspects of Brown's record: work habits that regularly produce more opinions than any other member of her court; a wide- ranging intellect and crisp writing style that have been widely praised; and her rise from humble beginnings as the daughter of Alabama sharecroppers.
Brown came to California as a child with her family and worked her way through college and UCLA Law School. Politically, she has migrated from left to right -- as she put it in a 1991 interview with a legal newspaper, "I'm sure you've heard the saying, 'If you aren't a liberal before you're 30, you have no heart, and if you are not a conservative before you're 40, you have no brain.' "
After 14 years of law practice, she was tapped by Gov. Pete Wilson to be his legal affairs secretary in 1991, then appointed by Wilson to a state appeals court in 1994 and to the state Supreme Court in 1996. She was the first African American woman ever named to the high court and was confirmed despite an unqualified rating by a State Bar panel, which said she lacked experience and injected her political views into legal rulings.
Brown's most important ruling was a November 2000 decision that interpreted Proposition 209, the voter-approved ban on race and sex preferences, to prohibit so-called outreach programs designed to recruit minority and female contractors. Her opinion condemned affirmative action and said Californians, by passing Prop. 209, had embraced equality of opportunity.
When more moderate justices prevail on the closely divided court, Brown is a frequent dissenter. She has disagreed with decisions overturning the parental consent law for abortions; strengthening the state's age- discrimination law; requiring Catholic Charities to provide contraceptives in health coverage for female employees; and upholding a fee charged to San Francisco landlords who convert residential rooms to tourist use, the case that prompted her observation about the extinction of private property in the city.
On the Texas Supreme Court, Owen, now a nominee to the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans, occupies a position comparable to Brown's in California. The Texas court has been an all-Republican, business-friendly tribunal since 1999, but it still contains some ideological divisions: Owen, in dissenting opinions, sometimes has found herself on the opposite side from more moderate justices appointed by George W. Bush when he was governor.
The most noted example was a series of rulings in 2000 on the state's parental notification law for minors' abortions. That law allows a pregnant girl under 18 to avoid notifying her parents if she persuades a judge she is mature and sufficiently well-informed about the consequences of abortions, an exemption Owen has voted almost invariably to deny.
In the first such case, she said a young woman seeking an abortion should have to show that she understands religious objections, a requirement upheld in other states but one that is not part of the Texas statute.
In a later abortion case, Alberto Gonzales -- then a Bush-appointed justice, now the U.S. attorney general -- accused Owen and two other dissenters of "an unconscionable act of judicial activism'' by trying to rewrite the law.
Owen, 50, an honor student at Baylor University Law School, spent 17 years in private law practice, mostly representing oil and gas clients, before winning a seat on Texas' high court in a 1994 election in which Bush aide Karl Rove was her campaign consultant. Her election gave Republicans a majority on the court for the first time since Reconstruction.
Her current foes include advocates for civil rights, consumers and labor, who accuse Owen of steadfastly promoting the positions of the business groups that helped put her in office. When the conservative court issues one of its infrequent rulings against a business, opponents say, Owen generally joins the dissenters.
One ruling, in 1998, upheld damages for a man who was severely injured by a light truck tire that exploded while he was inflating it. The dissent Owen signed said the man had ignored the manufacturer's warnings; the majority said the warnings did not excuse the tire's unsafe design. She also dissented from a 1998 ruling holding a vacuum cleaner company liable for a door-to-door salesman's rape of a customer and from a 2000 decision striking down a state law that exempted a landowner from local clean-water requirements.
Opponents also have criticized her for taking part in cases that have involved her campaign contributors, including Enron and Halliburton, but Owen's supporters note that her participation violated no state law.
Backers also cite an American Bar Association panel's assessment of Owen as well-qualified, its highest rating, for the federal court post, and her endorsements by some prominent Democrats, including three former court colleagues.
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Blocked previously
In addition to Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen, five other federal appeals court nominees have been blocked by Democratic filibusters and would be affected by the proposed change:
William Myers, Ninth Circuit (San Francisco). Idaho lawyer, former solicitor (chief legal officer) for the Interior Department under Bush, former lobbyist for cattle and mining industries. Opposed by environmental groups for statements criticizing environmental laws and regulation.
William Pryor, 11th Circuit (Atlanta). Former Alabama attorney general serving on the 11th Circuit since February 2004 under a short-term recess appointment by Bush. Called Roe vs. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, "the worst abomination of constitutional law in our history.'' Ended one speech by praying, "Please, God, no more Souters,'' referring to Supreme Court Justice David Souter, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush who has disappointed conservatives with his rulings.
Richard Griffin, Sixth Circuit (Cincinnati). judge, Michigan Court of Appeals, since 1989.
David McKeague, Sixth Circuit. judge, U.S. District Court, Lansing, Mich., since 1992.
Henry Saad, Sixth Circuit. judge, Michigan Court of Appeals, since 1994.
Democrats oppose the Sixth Circuit nominees because Republicans denied Senate hearings to two nominees of President Bill Clinton to the same court, and Bush has rejected requests from Michigan's two Democratic senators for a bipartisan commission to recommend candidates for federal court vacancies in that state. Democratic leaders also say Saad is too conservative.
ALSO OPPOSED BY DEMOCRATS: Several other Bush nominees to appeals courts also face possible Democratic filibusters unless the rules are changed:
Susan Bieke Neilson, Sixth Circuit. judge, 3rd Judicial Circuit, Michigan, since 1991. Opposed on the same grounds as the other Sixth Circuit nominees.
Terrence Boyle, Fourth Circuit (Richmond). U.S. District judge in Elizabeth City, N.C., since 1984. Former congressional aide who worked briefly as legislative assistant to Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C. Disability groups oppose him because of his rulings in disability-rights employment cases.
Thomas Griffith, District of Columbia Circuit. General counsel of Brigham Young University and former chief counsel to the U.S. Senate. As a member of the U.S. secretary of Education's Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, he suggested narrowing Title IX protections for women by eliminating a compliance test that compares the ratio of women to men on sports teams with the gender ratio in the campus population.
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In the words of the judicial candidates
California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown
"Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege, war in the streets, unapologetic expropriation of property, the precipitous decline of the rule of law, the rapid rise of corruption, the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.''
-- Speech to the Federalist Society, Chicago, April 2000
"With the approval of Proposition 209, the electorate chose to reassert the principle of equality of opportunity as a constitutional imperative.''
-- Majority opinion in Hi-Voltage Wire Works vs. City of San Jose, November 2000. The ruling dealt with an aspect of the California voter- approved ban on race and sex preferences.
Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen
"I would require a minor (seeking an abortion without notifying her parents) to demonstrate that she has sought and obtained meaningful counseling from a qualified source about the emotional and psychological impact she may experience now and later in her life as a result of having an abortion. ... She should also indicate to the court that she is aware of and has considered that there are philosophic, social, moral and religious arguments that can be brought to bear when considering abortion.''
-- Dissenting opinion in Jane Doe 1, February 2000
"The court today exercises raw power to override the will of the Legislature and of the people of Texas. ...How the Legislature chooses to regulate is left to the Legislature, not this court.''
-- Dissenting opinion in FM Properties Operating Co. vs. City of Austin, June 2000, in which the majority overturned a state law allowing a landowner to exempt itself from a city's water-quality rules
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
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