Eleanor Holmes Norton is a racist.

Watch as DC's powerless ignoramus (a deadly combination) fulminates helplessly against a fellow woman of color, albeit one with an education, accomplishments, class, grace, a brain...

The best way to understand the danger of the nuclear options is to inspect the records of the judges whose documented extremism make filibuster or withdrawal of the nominations the only options. They have in common nearly identical, across-the-board, far-right dogmatic views that displace the discipline of settled law. The two who are particularly unacceptable to people of color are Janice Rogers Brown, a California Supreme Court judge and an African American re-nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and Terrence Boyle, a Fourth Circuit District Court judge nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

Regrettably, Justice Brown’s service on the California Supreme Court has already borne out the prediction of the California Association of Black Lawyers who in originally opposing her nomination predicted that “her appointment may be detrimental to Black America” with nothing short of “far reaching consequences for generations to come.” Her decisions on racial discrimination have been shocking. Two cases illustrate the mind set she would bring to the Court of Appeals.

When her court found that the First Amendment did not keep a court from barring racial epithets in the workplace, Justice Brown suggested that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act also could not constitutionally bar such racially derogatory on-the-job speech, notwithstanding Supreme Court precedent to the contrary (Aguilar v. Avis Rent-a-Car Systems, Inc., 980 P.2d 846 (1999)). Moreover, Justice Brown’s view regarding the role of law in eliminating discrimination is longstanding, continuing and systematic. In one 2005 case, People v. Robert Young, 34 Cal. 4th 1149, she went out of her way to pronounce a unique and discredited view, deprecating the role of race in legal cases. Contradicting an explicit holding in 1985 California Supreme Court case, she found that black women are not a “cognizable group” that might encounter group discrimination. Perhaps the most revealing critique of Judge Brown’s fixed views on race and American law came from California Chief Justice Ronald George, who, like Justice Brown, was appointed by Governor Pete Wilson. In a race case where Brown and George were on the same side, Justice George nevertheless called her concurrence a “serious distortion of history” by equating segregationist practices with programs to eliminate discrimination. He warned that her views on race “will be widely and correctly viewed as presenting an unfair, inaccurate caricature of affirmative action programs” and are “likely to be viewed as less than evenhanded” (Hi-Voltage Wire Works, Inc. v. City of San Jose, 12 P.3d, 1068, 1093-95).

Justice Brown, who cites only one federal case in her ten most significant litigated cases, not only lacks the federal experience needed for the D.C. Circuit in particular. In racial and other federal cases that are more prominent in the D.C. Circuit than any others, she has shown disrespect for federal law and settled principles. President Bush has chosen to nominate to this circuit designated to decide matters of special federal importance a judge who was rated not qualified by 20 of the 23 voting members of the California Bar Commission when she was re-nominated to the California Supreme Court, in part because she ignored established precedent and inappropriately placed her personal and philosophical views in her opinions, according to the Commission. At the federal level, she received a rare ABA mixed qualified (majority) and not qualified (minority) rating. Janice Rogers Brown is unqualified to sit on the D.C. Circuit and her view on race makes her unfit to sit on any federal court today. Her nomination is an insult to people of color that would be compounded by a violation of the filibuster rule to enable her to serve.

Thank goodness this cow can't vote on legislative matters.