Picking on Pickering.

• Author: Peters, Charles
• Position: Tilting at Windmills

I applaud the recent media efforts by Mike Wallace and Nat Hentoff among others to tell Judge Charles Pickering's side of the story. He, you will remember, is the federal judge whose appointment to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals by George W. Bush was filibustered by the Democrats, so that he serves only by virtue of a recess appointment that runs out next year. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) accused Pickering of "glaring racial insensitivity" The facts are that Pickering had sent his children to an integrated school while many white Mississippians were doing otherwise, had successfully defended a young black man accused of robbing a white girl at knifepoint, had testified against the killer of civil fights worker Vernon Dahmer and had been rewarded with the Ku Klux Klan's successful opposition to his effort to gain reelection to the state Senate. Deborah Gambrell, who has represented the NAACP in a case before Pickering, says she is "shocked and appalled" at the attack on him by Senate Democrats.

I hope this is not another example of what the Democrats did to Clement Haynsworth when Richard Nixon nominated him for the Supreme Court in 1969. Haynsworth had earned a reputation as a sound, if conservative...