Charles Pickering (who the national Democratic Party would have you believe is a racist hatemonger, even if many Mississippi Democrats and the reliably left-wing Clarion-Ledger editorial board disagree) just issued a ruling in a racial segregation case, and somehow managed to do so without declaring the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unconstitutional. Stuart Buck and Howard Bashman have more.

Past posts on the Pickering smear campaign here.

As Will Baude (among others) notes, Charles Pickering got a recess appointment to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals today, bypassing the anticipated filibuster of his nomination by the Senate for now. While national Democrats have strongly opposed the nomination, he has attracted significant support from many Mississippi Democrats—who, unlike their national counterparts, usually need at least some support from moderate-to-conservative whites to stay in office.

Also, feel free to read my past Pickering posts.

Via Technorati, I found that J. at Silver Rights (who may or may not be the same person as “Mac Diva”) apparently thinks I’m being an apologist for Charles Pickering, on the basis of a Washington Post article that reveals absolutely nothing new about the controversial 1994 case in which Pickering quite rightly objected to giving the (arguably) least responsible perpetrator of an admittedly vile act the harshest sentence of the three young men involved.

I stand by my position that Pickering is being unjustly pilloried. If the Democrats dislike him for his politics or his overall jurisprudence, that is a fair objection; however, I don’t think this particular case is in any way emblematic of either, but instead has been blown out of proportion because screaming “racist” is easier than articulating philosophical objections to the appointment of a sitting district judge to a higher court.

If Democrats (and “J.”) genuinely believe he is a bad judge and the racist they claim him to be, they should be calling for his impeachment and removal from office, not pretending he’d be objectionable if sitting on an appeals court in New Orleans but O.K. to keep in office so long as he can only affect peoples’ lives as a trial court judge in Mississippi.

Victor at “Balasubramania’s Mania” somehow interprets this post as me “stand[ing] behind Pickering.” To the extent I agree with Pickering’s position that the sentencing “guidelines” (and anything that’s mandatory fails to meet any reasonable definition of the word guideline) are idiotic and lead to perverse outcomes, including in the particular case that these dustups are over, I suppose I am.

But I also think there are valid objections that can be made to Pickering’s appointment, and I stand by my position that if Pickering is as bad a judge as the Democrats think he is, then they should be arguing that he has no business sitting on a district court either, where he is in a position much more likely to harm minorities on a day-to-day basis (in sentencing and in the conduct of trials, for example) than on an appellate court. That they haven’t suggests that they don’t really take the racism charges against Pickering seriously, but instead find them a convenient way to object to his nomination without making the same objections they would have to make against every other Bush nominee and pretending that there is a substantive difference between Pickering and the others on those grounds alone. In short, I’d like to see more intellectual consistency here. (And surely if Pickering were a racist, there would be more than one case out of the thousands he’s presided over that would provide evidence of that.)

So, my message to Democrats remains the same: if you believe he’s unfit to serve on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, by definition he’s also unfit to serve as a district court judge. Be consistent, call for his impeachment and removal from office, and find some additional evidence, and then I might take your objections seriously. Until then, the whole situation reeks of inside-the-beltway politics and “easy,” gratuitous Mississippi bashing.

Sid Salter writes in today’s Clarion-Ledger about the heat State Rep. Phillip West is taking from his fellow legislative black caucus members for daring to break with the party line on the Charles Pickering nomination. Salter draws a damning parallel between the state’s current civil rights establishment and the segregationists who attacked Pickering when he testified against Klan leaders in the 1960s:

Pickering’s courage, integrity and morality were questioned publicly by the radical fringe of white Mississippians — just as West’s courage, integrity and morality are now being questioned by the radical fringe of black Mississippians.

Why? Same reason.

Both West and Pickering had the courage to do and say what was right on a controversial topic.

The SCLC and Black Caucus ought to be ashamed of themselves for continuing to spread lies about Pickering’s record. If they don’t like his judicial philosophy, that’s what they should say, and leave the invented racism charges out of it.

I accidentally linked to the wrong opinion article before; however, it’s also worth reading.

Hattiesburg American opinion editor Rich Campbell asks and answers that provocative question in a column in yesterday's paper, in response to the national Democrats' opposition to the Pickering nomination, supported by many Mississippi Democrats (seen at How Appealing).

It's a pretty good question, and one that reveals the friction in the median voter problem: Mississippi Democrats like Mike Moore, Ronnie Musgrove, and Ronnie Shows have very different interests in getting elected than many Democrats in other states, much as Republicans in New England aren't well-served by being associated in their voters' minds with the Christian Coalition wing of the party. In the long term, this may lead to either realignment or the development of regional or state parties; at some point, except in the Delta, no Democratic candidate will be able to appeal to a median voter simply due to the association with the national party — Gene Taylor could conceivably be the last white Democrat the state elects to Congress ever, and at the state level a similar phenomenon could easily emerge.