Senate confirms Brown as appeals court judge

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Democrats decry Brown's rhetoric
During the final hours of two days of Senate debate, Democrats portrayed Brown, a member of the California Supreme Court since 1996, as an extreme right-wing ideologue.

Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, condemned Brown for saying in a 2000 speech that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was “the triumph of our own socialist revolution.”

He accused Brown of wanting to scrap one of FDR’s creations, the Social Security system.

“Is this a mainstream point of view? How many people do you run into who say, ‘You know, we ought to get rid of Social Security because it’s just pure socialism, it’s too much government’? ‘We don’t want to have Social Security as our last effort to provide a safety net for Americans’? Janice Rogers Brown reached that conclusion. And because of that extreme view she became the poster child for the George W. Bush White House to put on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.”

Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and other Democrats assailed Brown’s dissent in a case in which her colleagues upheld a San Francisco ordinance that required hotel owners who converted their properties from residential use to tourist use to pay the city a fee to help low-income people pay for housing.

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In her dissent, Brown contended that “private property, already an endangered species in California, is now entirely extinct in San Francisco.”

Brown added, “Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery. Turning a democracy into a kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves; it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government.”

Republican sees her as defender of individuals
But one of her Republican allies, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, told the Senate that critics ignored her defense of individual rights.

He pointed to her dissent in a case in which a man was arrested for riding his bicycle and not carrying some form of identification.

Brown said she thought the police might have stopped him because he did not look like he belonged in the neighborhood.

She said she did not know the man’s race, but it later turned out he was black.

“She thought that was racial profiling. She was the only one (on the California Supreme Court) who said that,” Sessions said. “Who was standing up for someone who could have been a victim of discrimination? Janice Rogers Brown.”

Sen. John Warner, R-Va., called her “an extraordinarily accomplished individual.... I believe she’ll make an excellent jurist.”

Alluding to the fact that she was the first African-American woman to serve on California’s highest state court, Warner noted that he had recommended the first African-American to serve as a federal district judge in Virginia.

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