After Lott, Bush’s Challenge

Trent Lott’s political free-fall ended with a thud Friday when the disgraced and chastened Mississippian agreed to resign the post of Senate majority leader. Lott’s Republican colleagues ultimately shoved the senator aside to staunch the damage he was doing to the party, despite his ever-more-desperate apologies for waxing nostalgic about racial segregation at Sen. Strom Thurmond’s (R-S.C.) 100th birthday party and in earlier statements.

But Lott’s announcement presents an even bigger challenge -- or opportunity -- to President Bush and his supporters in the Senate, who pitch themselves as compassionate conservatives and inclusive big-tenters but who too often have pursued a different agenda on civil rights.

Few politicians or judges are as blunt or voluble as Lott on civil rights issues. But for the last two years, the president’s nominees to federal appeals courts have tended toward lower-court judges whose records display a striking antipathy to workers and minorities, disguised in the carefully groomed language of states’ rights.

U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering of Mississippi was one, a Lott friend whose bona fides as a segregationist pushed the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject him for an appellate seat this year. Bush had vowed to renominate Pickering for what looked like certain confirmation by the Republican-controlled Senate. With Lott disgraced, Pickering may become too hot a political potato for the president.

Bush still stands solidly behind other nominees to appellate courts who lack Pickering’s blatant record on segregation but have made their names by resisting this nation’s commitment to equal opportunity: Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Carolyn Kuhl, who argued in 1981 that racially discriminatory Bob Jones University should be allowed to keep its tax-exempt status; Jeffrey Sutton for his antipathy to federal protections for state workers; U.S. District Judge Terrence W. Boyle of North Carolina, a former staffer to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and twice overruled by the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down minority voting districts; and Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, whose undisguised activism on the bench against abortion rights drew fire even from one of Bush’s top counselors.

Lott’s disgrace gives the White House and Senate an opportunity to go deaf to aging former Dixiecrats and their debt to a racist past. Bush, who appropriately called segregation “unfaithful to our founding ideals,” can further distance himself from the old double standard by nominating centrists to the bench.

He also could offer the most contentious nominees the opportunity to withdraw. That would save the Senate’s new leaders from having to defend would-be federal judges who are exclusionary, if more subtle than Lott.