George Will takes Senate Dems to task today for their opposition to Leslie Southwick’s nomination to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. In the process, Will plays a little fast and loose with the facts.
[B]ecause [Southwick] is a white Mississippian, many liberals consider him fair game for unfairness. Many say his defect is “insensitivity,” an accusation invariably made when specific grievances are few and flimsy.
Obama, touching all the Democratic nominating electorate’s erogenous zones, concocts a tortured statistic about Southwick’s “disappointing record on cases involving consumers, employees, racial minorities, women and gays and lesbians. After reviewing his 7,000 opinions, Judge Southwick could not find one case in which he sided with a civil rights plaintiff in a non-unanimous verdict.” Surely the pertinent question is whether Southwick sided with the law.
First, the notion that Dems oppose a judicial nominee because he’s white is ridiculous, even by Will’s standards. Second, Will is missing the point of the 7,000-case example.
As Emily Bazelon recently explained, during Southwick’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) asked Southwick to name an example of an unpopular decision he made in which he favored the little guy — “a poor person, or a member of a minority group, or someone who’d simply turned to the courts for help.” Southwick couldn’t name a single case.
Will’s argument is that Southwick’s concern as a jurist should be for the law, not the downtrodden. Perhaps. But in hearing 7,000 cases over several years, Southwick’s reading of the law seemed remarkably one-sided — he always favored powerful interests. What a coincidence that the law was so consistently on their side.
Bazelon added, “Southwick voted ‘against the injured party and in favor of business interests’ in 160 of 180 cases that gave rise to a dissent and that involved employment law and injury-based suits for damages. When one judge on a panel dissents in a case, there’s an argument it could come out either way, which makes these cases a good measure of how a judge thinks when he’s got some legal leeway. In such cases, Judge Southwick almost never favors the rights of workers or people who’ve suffered discrimination or been harmed by a shoddy product.”
Opposition to Southwick’s nomination has nothing to do with him being “a white Mississippian.” Will surely knows better.
