I’m a little confused about something. Here is an unsurprisingly laudatory Reason article on Janice Brown, the DC Circuit nominee who is liable to be filibustered unless Senate Republicans exercise the “nuclear option”. (There’s a decent joke about a “Frist strike policy” to be made there, but unfortunately Bill beat me to it.)

What’s disconcerting here, though, is not that Reason is writing pieces that endear me to a libertarian judge, but that when I go looking for the bad news on Brown, I can’t find it. This is representative of the form, and although it is a non-insane, soberly written, substantive piece intended to be critical of Brown, I don’t come away from it thinking any less of her. (You mean she has “[c]alled for the Supreme Court to return to its pre-1937 pattern of sweeping away many federal and state economic regulations by imposing severe limits on Congress’s power to regulate interstate commerce…”? Say it ain’t so!) The leftish side of the commentariat seems convinced that Brown is the worst thing since unsliced bread, but I’m not sure why. I know she opposes affirmative action, but that by itself hardly seems to merit her being made the poster child for Evil Bush Judges. Am I missing something here, or what?

(We discussed this before a bit, here. Janice Brown, Terri Schiavo, and me using labored metaphors relating to the slicedness of bread: truly, there is no new thing under the sun.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 5th, 2005 at 15:20 by olly and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.