Fair and mainstream: Liberals use the judiciary to impose their policies

When it comes to judges, Democrat Sens. Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, Pat Leahy, John Kerry, John Edwards, Harry Reid and company just won't budge.

Not even for a nonpartisan compromise offered by Majority Leader Bill Frist that would allow 100 hours of debate on each judge and guarantee votes on every judicial nominee in the future, whether nominated by a Republican or Democrat President, and regardless of what party controls the Senate. The Democrats still refuse to vote on President Bush's most important and highly qualified nominees to the federal courts of appeal.

Why? They claim it's because these judges, such as Justice Priscilla Owen of Texas and Justice Janice Rogers Brown of California, are "extreme." If that were true, you can count on it: Left-wing interest groups and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would be clamoring for a vote; they'd want Republicans on record as having supported such "extremists" in the next election cycle.

Surely in 100 hours they could expose these judges as extremists, get the support of mainstream America, and send the Republicans packing.

Truth is, Democrats are hiding from a debate, and hiding from a vote, precisely because these highly qualified judges are the mainstream.

They are intellectual stars on the courts where they now sit.

They have the overwhelming bipartisan support of the citizens of their states, the American Bar Association, the bench and bar, and newspapers across the political spectrum.

For example, even the Washington Post endorsed Judge Owen after President Bush nominated her to the Fifth Circuit, and the San Francisco Chronicle endorsed Judge Brown in her latest California Supreme Court election.

Most important, Justices Owen and Brown have demonstrated their inclination to "judicial restraint": They merely apply the rules that we, the people, make. They don't make the rules themselves. That's a job for Congress and the president, who must respond to the will of the citizens who elected them.

Judges, on the other hand, are supposed to be neutral: They take those rules that we make, in our representative democracy, and apply them to disputes.

That's why our federal judges are appointed for life: so that they can be impartial and feel no pressure when applying the rules the people have made.

Federal judges undermine the Constitution and subvert our representative democracy if they invent their own rules and essentially change the laws like politicians.

President Bush made a campaign issue of his intent to nominate judges who respect their role in our constitutional system. He won the presidency, and with it the responsibility and prerogative - under Article II of the Constitution, as the elected official who represents all Americans - to appoint judges whose judicial philosophy he approves. He nominated Justices Owen and Brown because they are fair jurists who respect the Constitution and laws as written. They have strong minds and strong backbones. They won't be pressured on the bench by groups such as People for the American Way, or the editorial page of the New York Times, into making up new rules to suit a liberal agenda that can't win at the ballot box.

Judges who practice judicial restraint understand that policy decisions - such as whether to take under God out of the Pledge of Allegiance, whether to allow child pornography, whether to redefine marriage to include groups other than one man and one woman - are not matters for judges to decide, but for elected representatives of the people to decide.

The liberals have lost the presidency, lost the Senate, and will surely continue to lose ballot initiatives.

That is why they are so desperate to retain a grip on the federal judiciary: so they can impose on the rest of us policies that are decidedly not "mainstream."

My dictionary defines "mainstream" as "a prevailing current or direction of activity or influence" - like the "prevailing direction of activity" reflected in the map of red states following the 2004 elections, and like the "prevailing current" that carried South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle, who blocked the President's mainstream judicial nominees in the last Congress, out of Washington and swept in Sen. John Thune, who better represented their views.

Schumer and friends are certainly free to dislike mainstream judges, mainstream presidents, and mainstream voters. But these liberals are the ones who are "outside the mainstream."

Wendy E. Long is a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network.