White House Nod Expected for State Jurist

President Bush is expected to nominate California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, administration officials and sources close to Brown said Friday.

The appointment, pending completion of FBI background checks, would be apt to meet stiff resistance from Senate Democrats concerned that the conservative jurist is being groomed for an even higher judicial post.

The appeals panel, which has jurisdiction over appeals of rulings by federal agencies, generally is considered second in prestige only to the U.S. Supreme Court. For that reason, it has served as a judicial launching pad -- three of the high court’s nine justices are alumni of the federal panel.

The confirmation of Brown to one of three vacancies on the appeals court also would tilt it further to the right. The court currently consists of five justices appointed by Republican presidents and four by Democrats.

Senate Democratic leaders already have blocked Bush’s nomination of lawyer Miguel Estrada to the court. And Brown probably would encounter similar opposition.

“She would be in for a rough road,” said Nan Aron, the president of the Alliance for Justice, a liberal advocacy group that tracks judicial nominations. “The court would at this point be tilted so far in a right-leaning direction that I think [Democratic] senators would

Some liberal groups already are preparing dossiers on Brown’s judicial opinions.

But her backers say that she would be a formidable nominee who could prove hard to defeat. She has a compelling personal history -- the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper worked her way through college and law school and became the first African American woman to sit on California’s highest court.

Through an assistant, Brown declined comment.

She served as legal affairs secretary to former California Gov. Pete Wilson. He appointed her to the state appeals court in Sacramento in 1994 and to the state high court in 1996.

Her judicial record is almost in perfect harmony with Bush administration thinking: She supports limits on abortion rights, for instance, and routinely votes to uphold the death penalty.

In 1997, she dissented from a state Supreme Court ruling that struck down a state law requiring girls under 18 to receive parental permission before getting an abortion.

“This case is an excellent example of the folly of courts in their role of philosopher kings,” she wrote.

In 2000, she wrote the majority opinion that found a minority contracting program in San Jose to be unlawful under Proposition 209, the 1996 ballot initiative prohibiting the use of racial preferences.

She received her undergraduate degree from Cal State Sacramento and graduated from UCLA School of Law in 1977. She is married to Dewey Parker, a jazz musician.