Below is an email from NOW in bold. My thoughts in italics within the email.
NOW Condemns Senate Confirmation of Priscilla Owen
May 25, 2005
Today the Senate approved the controversial nomination of Priscilla Owen after a filibuster was ended — the result of a "compromise" by 14 senators Monday night. Democrats filibustered Owen's nomination twice in the past four years, and it is worth noting that they again garnered more than the 41 votes needed to maintain a filibuster, had that option not been removed by the compromise.
"Another notch in Karl Rove's belt," NOW President Kim Gandy called the Senate's 56 to 43 confirmation of Owen to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
Karl Rove's involved with this?
Owen, whose career from obscure Houston lawyer to the U.S. Court of Appeals was engineered by Karl Rove, embodies the basest of political motives—payback, pure and simple. Rove plucked Owen from relative obscurity and raised nearly $1 million for her first campaign. And he will no doubt be gratified, as Owens' anti-women, anti-civil rights, anti-worker and pro-business opinions benefit the wealthy and powerful—George W. Bush's political base. Like her fellow Texan Tom DeLay, Owen is ethically challenged, having taken campaign contributions from corporations like Enron and Halliburton and then ruling in their favor.
Are they speaking about a terrorist here?
According to the facts... She was a standout at the top of her Baylor University Law School class; she became a partner at a major Houston law firm, Andrews & Kurth, where she practiced commercial litigation for 17 years; and she was elected in 1994 to the Texas Supreme Court, and re-elected in 2000. She received the highest rating, "well-qualified," from an American Bar Association committee that reviews judicial nominations.
Hardly from an obscure past. If she is so anti (such a negative word) why did she get nominated twice and well spoken by the American BAR Association?
"Priscilla Owen is now the proud owner of a lifetime appointment to the second highest court in the United States, where she can inflict her utter disregard for individual rights on the people of Louisiana and Mississippi—as she has been doing for the more than 10 years in Texas," charged Gandy.
Unlike your ideology oppressing the public, eh Gandy?
As a member of the Texas Supreme Court, Owen consistently took the side of big corporations and the powerful against workers and against ordinary people who had been injured by wrongdoing. In one case involving a young man who had been injured in a truck accident, Owen delayed writing the opinion for a year and a half. According to the New York Times, "the man, who was on a respirator, died when the family could not afford nursing care because the appeal delayed the multimillion-dollar verdict." Her pro-business bias is so strong that in her 2002 judiciary committee hearing, despite an extensive record of dissents, she could not find even one occasion in which she had dissented in favor of an individual suing a corporation.
Rather than pulling one example in 17 plus years, I would like to see the whole grid of her actions.
Owen's contemptible record on women's rights, civil rights, and individual rights makes her unfit for a lifetime appointment, and many innocent people will pay the price for this base act of political patronage. Her opinions were publicly criticized at least a dozen times by Bush's own Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, when they were both on the Texas Supreme Court. In one case, when Owen tried to re-write Texas' abortion laws to suit her own ideology, Gonzales referred to the attempt as "unconscionable judicial activism."
"Our democracy and our rights were compromised by the machinations of a power-hungry administration and its lackeys in the Senate who put their allegiance to George W. Bush above their oath of office," Gandy said. "The fight is not over. Moderate senators must put the interests of their constituents ahead of the Republican leadership's slash-and-burn politics, and refuse to be strong-armed into approving any more extremist nominees."
Dang Gandy, sounds like your in a war, rather an organization to further your cause. Who were the lackeys in the Senate that compromised the unwilling up or down vote? Put the interests of the constituents ahead? That would be a first.
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