Even Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee who ultimately did not support Judge Pickering’s nomination... went out of their way to state that he is not a racist.

Setting the Record Straight on Judge Pickering

By Senator Orrin G. Hatch

In 1962, the Governor of Mississippi violated an order of the United States Supreme Court and personally barred James Meredith, a black student, from enrolling at the University of Mississippi.  It took hundreds of United States Marshals and National Guard soldiers, acting under the direction of President Kennedy, to ensure his enrollment.  Wide-scale rioting ensued.  Dozens of U.S. Marshals were shot; hundreds of people were injured; two men were killed.  This is the Mississippi that still existed when Judge Charles Pickering sent his young children to newly integrated public schools in Jones County, Mississippi, in the 1960s.

Throughout the 1960s, no less than in prior decades, the Ku Klux Klan gripped the South in a powerful stranglehold of ignorant hatred and violent opposition to racial tolerance.  In her powerful book, Coming of Age in Mississippi, Anne Moody recounts growing up black and describes the horror of finding her name on a Klan "wanted" list and seeing a black child beaten as FBI agents languidly watched from a short distance.   This is the Mississippi that existed when Judge Charles Pickering, then a young county attorney in Jones County, helped to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan, ultimately testifying in open court against its leader, the Imperial Wizard.  He did so despite widespread — and deadly and demonstrably credible — risk of violence to him, his wife and his four young children.  For his bravery and commitment to racial equality in the segregated Mississippi of the 1960s, County Attorney Charles Pickering was not re-elected to that office.

A wartime hero typically gains the privilege of never again having his valor or courage questioned.  Yet Judge Pickering is being branded a racist in the media and by special interest groups despite his unquestionable commitment to racial equality in the places where it mattered the most:  in the front lines, while waging battle against an enemy that surely could do him grievous harm.  Against this documented history of action when it mattered the most, it is astonishing to still hear the steady drumbeat of charges that Judge Pickering is racially insensitive.

Not surprisingly, these charges are measured out in convenient sound bites by those liberal interest groups who practice precisely the politics of personal destruction.  Facts do not matter to them, impressions do, and the more incendiary, the better.  Judge Pickering’s opponents stake their claim to Judge Pickering’s supposed racial insensitivity principally on his actions in one case in which he pressured prosecutors to lower a five to seven year sentence on a defendant in a cross-burning case where the prosecutors had given the other co-defendants — including the undisputed ringleader — probation.  Despite Judge Pickering’s brave commitment to civil rights in the face of personal danger, these detractors choose to ignore another case where Judge Pickering went beyond the ordinary to reduce the sentence of a black man convicted on a first-time drug offense.   But why let the facts get in the way?

The racial attack levied against Judge Pickering is simply unfair.  Even Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee who ultimately did not support Judge Pickering’s nomination — including Senators Joseph Biden, Russell Feingold, Richard Durbin, and John Edwards — went out of their way to state that he is not a racist.  And any observer of the confirmation process knows by now that abortion, not race, is the far-left’s real litmus test.  They oppose the nominees they believe have deeply held personal beliefs against abortion.

As my Democratic colleague Senator Charles Schumer put it, "the record is quite full" and the "issues have been aired sufficiently."  Democratic leader Senator Tom Daschle said back in February that "in Mr. Pickering’s case we know the record."   Although both are opposed to the nomination, they are right and, after more than 860 days, it’s time for the Senate to vote on this nomination.

Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-UT) is the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

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