A Mushroom Cloud Hovers Over a Bush Judicial Nominee

This is Hollywood, people, and in Hollywood we can’t let even a game show -- far less a boffo cinematic moment in American politics -- pass by without a musical score: So. Should today’s Senate confrontation be performed to the wet-your-pants suspenseful music from “Jaws”? The screeching violin terror from “Psycho”? The heart-cracking adagio lament from “Platoon”? Or the blackcomedic “Springtime for Hitler” from “The Producers”?

The working title of this shoot-’em-up is “The Nuclear Option,” but I think it’s more like the Vietnam option: the willingness by some Republicans with more ambition than statesmanship to destroy the Senate in order to save their true-believer political plan. But we’ll stick with the nuclear metaphor because the weapons-grade plutonium is Janice Rogers Brown, a conservative justice on the California Supreme Court, and a Texas counterpart, Priscilla Owen.

In George W. Bush’s first term, he got 201 of his federal judge nominees confirmed, more than Bill Clinton in his first four years. But because Democrats brought out the filibuster or threatened it for 10 other nominees -- Brown among them -- Republicans are ready to trash the judicial filibuster itself to push through every single one of Bush’s nominees, beginning with Owen and Brown.

Bush wants to move Brown from California to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a farm team for the federal Supremes. She has a lot of things going for her. She’s smart, she writes well and has what they call a “compelling life story” -- she meets politics’ movie-of-the-week standard: a triumphant biography of obstacles overcome. Brown’s nomination also gives Republicans the treat of forcing Democrats to explain why they’re voting against a black woman.

It isn’t entirely Brown’s conservatism that has made her a no-go nominee for Democrats. Her political philosophy, like any grown-up’s, is not monolithic. She came down against the cops in the case of a bicyclist arrested and searched because he was riding against traffic and had no ID. “It would not get anyone arrested,” she wrote, “unless he looked like he did not belong in the neighborhood. And it matters.” You can see her “compelling life story” in that -- Southern born, black and the wife and mother of black American men.

Instead, it’s the tone of dismissive arrogance that threads through her speeches, her writings, even her dealings with colleagues that is alarming. About three weeks ago, she told an audience of Catholic legal professionals that these are “perilous times for people of faith,” that religious people are at “war” against secular humanists. When the country moves away from its religious traditions, she said, it alters the very concepts of freedom and liberty.

War, Madame Justice? I thought America’s war was against Islamic terrorists, not one another. On these shores, dispute and disagreement aren’t war -- they’re constitutional rights, democratic obligations. A justice who complains about a “nation of whiners” begins to sound a little whiny herself.

Brown has regaled audiences with her view that the New Deal is a triumph of the “socialist revolution,” and she has spoken about “government” with a combative, zero-sum hostility that’s a little surprising for someone who’s spent most of her adult life working in it:

“Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies.” We get “a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible.” (Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Office of Management and Budget is producing “Desperate Housewives.”)

Then there are Brown’s low marks in the “works well with others” category -- not John Bolton low, but not precisely warm and fuzzy. Five of her six California Supreme Court colleagues are Republicans, but you wouldn’t know it from the sardonic critiques that have zinged off Brown’s keyboard.

Brown was still green behind the robes when she lectured her colleagues for having “an overactive lawmaking gland” and waxed patronizing about their “quixotic desire to do good, be universally fair and make everybody happy.”

The court was unanimous in a case testing the anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209, but Brown’s opinion moved Chief Justice Ron George to write his own, citing hers as “an unfair and inaccurate caricature” of equal-opportunity practices.

Brown’s snarky dissent in a case overturning parental consent for teenagers’ abortions emboldened an effort to dump George and another Republican appointee from the court. She called the case “an excellent example of the folly of the courts in the role of philosopher kings” -- this from a woman who sounds as if she hankers to become the Republicans’ warrior queen of the federal bench.

From all reports of the Janice Rogers Brown Fire-Starter Kit -- rub your colleagues the wrong way until you get a flame -- I wouldn’t be surprised if some California colleagues wouldn’t mind helping to push her, Trojan horse-like, inside the federal judiciary’s gates, and then run like hell all the way home.

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Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.