FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE April 21, 2005
AMERICANS WILL REJECT SENATE REPUBLICANS’
PUSH FOR EXTREME JUDGES
(Washington, DC) – NARAL Pro-Choice America said the decision by Republicans on the Judiciary Committee’s to reconsider two virulently anti-choice activist judicial nominees is part of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s push for the “nuclear option.”
The "nuclear option," a Republican effort to change two-century old Senate rules, would make it easier for divisive nominees who have failed to gain bipartisan consensus to be approved for lifetime appointments on narrow, party-line votes.
The Judiciary Committee today approved on a narrow, party-line vote the nominations of Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and the District of Columbia, respectively. Both Owen and Rogers Brown have failed to generate the bipartisan support necessary to gain full Senate approval because of their willingness to rewrite the law to conform to their out-of-touch anti-choice beliefs.
Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said the public is tired of anti-choice Senate Republicans trying to stack the federal courts with judges who would vote to overturn the constitutional right to privacy established by Roe v. Wade.
“The push to resurrect the failed nominations of divisive nominees like Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown only reinforces why the American public opposes Senator Frist’s push for the ‘nuclear option.’ Both Owen and Brown are extreme judges who have put their rigid political ideology ahead of protecting the constitutional right to privacy. They can’t get moderate, bipartisan support, so the ‘nuclear option’ is their only hope,” Keenan said. “Senator Frist is wrong to believe that resurrecting the nominations of these two women will make pro-choice organizations shy away from reminding the public of these nominees' hostility toward constitutional protections for a woman’s right to choose. The public wants nominees for lifetime positions on the federal courts to meet a higher standard than extreme anti-choice jurists like Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown are capable of reaching.”
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Contact: Ted Miller, 202.973.3032
