REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The New Dixiecrats
Ralph Neas and John Edwards use race to divide America.
A fascinating thing has happened on the way to the Senate "borking" of appellate court nominee Charles Pickering Sr. Taking orders from their interest groups, Beltway Democrats have tried to portray the Mississippian as a modern Lester Maddox. But the African-Americans back in the judge's hometown of Laurel have responded that nothing could be further from the truth.
So whom to believe? The people who know Judge Pickering personally and have watched him in court and local politics for years? Or the national liberal lobbies that have a history of turning judicial hearings into political blood sport?
"I can't believe the man they're describing in Washington is the same one I've known for years," says Thaddeus Edmonson, a former president of the local NAACP and now a member of the Laurel City Council. "If those people who are voting against him because of some press release would just come down here and talk to the people who know him, I think they would have a very different opinion." But Ralph Neas, the head borker, told the New York Times that this sort of local opinion didn't matter because the poor rubes don't know the judge's real record.
What's going on here is that Mr. Neas has been caught red-handed. He and his allies have been caught race-baiting for political purposes, and in a way that bears not even a passing resemblance to reality. The question now is whether Senate Democrats are going to keep playing the race card too.
Of course Mr. Neas says he isn't calling Judge Pickering "a racist." It's just the judge's "actions as a public official" that show "insensitivity and hostility" toward civil rights, Mr. Neas says. If hostility toward civil rights isn't a code phrase for racist, we don't know what is. Readers can get their own insight into the Neas mentality by viewing his 3,300-word open letter, responding to our February 8 editorial, on the Web site of the People for the American Way.
It's important to understand why Mr. Neas and friends are playing this kind of ugly racial politics: First is to create a public misperception that the Bush Administration's judicial nominees are right-wing extremists who want to turn back the clock on race, abortion and religion. Call this a dress rehearsal for the President's first Supreme Court nomination.
Second is to scare Senate Democrats from the South into voting against Judge Pickering out of fear of losing crucial black support back home. With Southern politics polarized by race, Democrats need upward of 90% of the black vote, and a strong turnout, to win elections. This gives the unscrupulous every incentive to shout "race" at every opportunity. And it makes Mr. Neas and Julian Bond and their fellow liberals the real heirs to Lester Maddox and Strom Thurmond and the Democrats who played the race card during the 1950s and 1960s. They're the new Dixiecrats.
In this case, Mr. Neas and company are using the race card to inflame the opinion of black voters in order to put pressure on Southern Democrats. All the more so because it looks as if at least two of those Democrats, Zell Miller of Georgia and Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, are inclined to vote for Judge Pickering if his nomination ever makes it to the Senate floor. That's why Mr. Neas, aided by Majority Leader Tom Daschle, is trying to kill the nomination in the liberal-dominated Judiciary Committee.
On that committee, the main Neas acolyte is North Carolina Senator John Edwards, who skewered Judge Pickering in his hearing earlier this month and then went out to California and bragged about his race-baiting to liberal crowds. This is a man who wants to be President.
Senator Edwards grilled the judge on a cross-burning case called Swan over which he presided in 1994. By posing questions based on half-truths and refusing to let the nominee reply in full, Mr. Edwards made it appear that Judge Pickering had treated one of the defendants with unusual leniency after consulting improperly with the Justice Department in Washington.
In fact, Judge Pickering behaved properly in Swan, which he has called a "heinous," "serious" and "hateful" crime. The record shows that he objected to the "gross disparity" in sentencing between two defendants--a juvenile and an adult with a very low IQ who got probation and home detention--and the third, who was initially going to spend more than seven years in jail. The judge ended up giving him 27 months, a sentence that was approved by the local federal prosecutor and the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.
The Edwards interrogation was so over-the-top that it has raised the ire of one of the Democratic Party's most loyal fund-raisers, Mississippi trial lawyer Dickie Scruggs. He told Roll Call that the Senator's assault on Judge Pickering "wasn't the manly thing to do" and that he will rally his fellow lawyers into not giving any money to Mr. Edwards's Presidential campaign.
Nominations to appellate courts, in this case to the Fifth Circuit, rarely rise to this level of public controversy. But the vicious liberal tactics have made the Pickering fight a potential watershed. If he is defeated we can expect more of the same. But if somehow he prevails, the Senate will have shown there is at least some limit on the exploitation of race in American politics.
