No too long ago, leprosy was an untreatable, fatal disease. Lepers were usually banished to a “leper colony” where they had only one another to help them survive. Most didn’t survive long. Lepers who lived outside a leper colony would have to announce their leprosy as they walked around. They were forced to call out, “Unclean! Unclean!” so the public could avoid them.
According to some Senate Democrats, America has a new type of lepers. Here are two leper biographies the U.S. Government website.
“Born in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, Miguel A. Estrada immigrated to the United States with his family as a teenager. Mr. Estrada graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a bachelor’s degree from Columbia College, New York, in 1983. He received a juris doctor degree magna cum laude in 1986 from Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, Mr. Estrada served as a law clerk for the Honorable Anthony M. Kennedy of the U.S. Supreme Court.
From 1990 until 1992, Mr. Estrada served as Assistant U.S. Attorney and Deputy Chief of the Appellate Section, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York. In 1992, he joined the United States Department of Justice as an Assistant to the Solicitor General. In those capacities, Mr. Estrada represented the government in numerous jury trials and in many appeals before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Mr. Estrada practiced law in New York with Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz.”
“Justice Priscilla Owen was elected to the Supreme Court of Texas in 1994 and reelected in 2000. She is a native Texan and earned her B.A. from Baylor University and her Juris Doctor in 1977 from the Baylor University School of Law, where she ranked the top of her graduating class.
Before her election, Justice Owen was a partner in the Houston firm of Andrews & Kurth, L.L.P., where she practiced commercial litigation for 17 years. She was admitted to practice before the United States Courts of Appeals for the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and Eleventh Circuits.
Justice Owen was chosen as Baylor Young Lawyer of the Year and one of Baylor’s Outstanding Young Alumna. She is a member of the American Law Institute and serves as the Supreme Court’s liaison to the Texas Legal Services for the Poor Special Committee, and the Supreme Court Advisory Committee on Court-Annexed Mediations.”
A minority of Democrats in the Senate are now filibustering President Bush’s judicial nominations of Miguel A. Estrada and Priscilla Owen. As you can see by their biographies, the filibuster has nothing to do with the nominees’ qualifications. Both are the cream of the crop, intellectually and professionally.
It seems the filibuster has little to do with the nominees, and much to do with some Democrats’ pure hatred for our President. Since President Bush took office, more appeals court nominees have waited at least a year for a hearing than in the last 50 years combined. During President Bush’s first two years in office, only 53-percent of Appeals Court nominees were confirmed compared to a rate of over 90-percent during the same period for the last three Presidencies. And more filibusters are threatened.
The Democrats leading the filibuster are Tom Daschle, Patrick Leahy, Charles Schumer, Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer. They say they are stopping the vote from taking place because they believe both nominees are “extreme anti-abortionists.” (Lepers?)
Since there is no court case history or documentation on which to base this accusation, we must assume there is something else.
There is. The nominees cannot provide evidence of personally performing an abortion. Considering the reputation of the Democrat filibusterers, a video would be about the only acceptable evidence.
So who’s extreme?
I’m no longer disgusted with Daschle’s little group. Abortion is their religion and they follow it blindly. I do believe they’re demented, but that’s their problem.
My problem is with the gutless Republicans who allow other Senate business to go on, while the Democrats refuse to allow a vote that Estrada and Owen would win.
Republicans should say, “You want a filibuster? Then filibuster. All Senate business will stop while you hold the floor.”
That would force the minority that’s holding up the nominations to explain to their constituents why nothing was getting done in the Senate. Soon enough, there would be 60 Senators eager to end the filibuster. And these two worthy judges could escape from the Democrat-guarded leper colony.
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© 2008 by George V. Caylor. All rights reserved.
The heart of the wise inclines to the right, but the heart of the fool to the left.
(Ecclesiastes 10:2)
