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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
President Bush dumped Trent Lott because of his segregationist baggage. So why is he fighting relentlessly for a judge who has refused to come clean about his own bigoted past?
May 12, 2003 | When Senate Democrats voted last March to reject Judge Charles Pickering's nomination to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Majority Leader Trent Lott called the vote "a slap at Mississippi, my state." In fact, the bitter party-line vote on Pickering revolved around the same issues that would bring down Lott nine months later: Mississippi's shameful history of racism, and the pro-segregation politics practiced by state Republicans like Pickering and Lott in the 1960s.
Pickering has long tried to downplay and even disavow that history, in sworn testimony to the Senate during his first confirmation hearing in 1990, and again in 2002. Since 1964, the year he switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party, the Mississippi judge told the Senate last year, he "was involved and [has] been involved in trying to establish better race relations" in his home state. His supporters have gone even further, calling Pickering, in Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell's words, a man with the "resounding virtue" of "moral courage," who "had to deal with white citizens and politicians who resisted integration and civil rights." But Democrats weren't convinced by the way Pickering recast his history, with Sen. Charles Schumer of New York calling his civil rights record "troubling."
Now, with Republicans back in control of the Senate, President Bush has resubmitted Pickering's nomination, and he's got a new shot at joining the crucial, conservative bench on the 5th Circuit. But there's also new evidence that Pickering has lied about his efforts "to establish better race relations" in the 1960s, discovered in the papers of Pickering's former law partner, the devoted segregationist J. Carroll Gartin.
The new evidence, housed at the University of Mississippi Library, shows that Pickering's decision to defect to the Republicans -- a key turning point in his public career -- came at the strong urging of Gartin, who as lieutenant governor from 1956 to 1960 and again from 1964 until his sudden death in 1966 was a leading member of Mississippi's notoriously racist Sovereignty Commission. Gartin's papers -- including his personal letters and other private documents, plus memos, press releases and news clippings from the time -- also confirm, in more detail than ever before, that Pickering became a Republican in 1964 to protest the national Democratic Party's support for civil rights and its attacks on segregation -- a motive the judge refused to acknowledge in his testimony last year.
A decision on Pickering's nomination could come as early as this week. The GOP is so determined to crush Democratic opposition to Bush's more conservative appointees that Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is trying to change the filibuster rules, and on Friday Bush demanded that senators vote on his nominees within 180 days. Pickering's nomination isn't currently scheduled for a hearing, and it's possible Republicans will push for a vote without one. The Pickering nomination could become a test case in the escalating war over judicial appointments between the White House and Senate Democrats. The new revelations found in his law partner's papers could well strengthen the Democrats' hand. Pickering could not be reached for comment about the Gartin papers, and Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the Judiciary Committee chairman, did not return calls.
Even without the new evidence from Gartin's papers, Pickering's testimony had already yielded some troubling contradictions, distortions and apparent falsehoods -- a pattern of dissembling that calls into question his fitness for the federal bench. And Gartin and the Sovereignty Commission have been the subject of many of Pickering's most dubious public statements in recent years, including statements given under oath.
In 1990, for instance, when he was successfully nominated as a federal judge for the southern district of Mississippi, Pickering testified that he had had no contact with the commission and knew little about its operations. This was false, as the commission's subsequently released files show. In 2002, Pickering attempted to correct his false testimony, saying that he had contacted the commission in 1972 because he was concerned about possible Ku Klux Klan infiltration of a union in his hometown. This too was false: Commission records show that Pickering actually contacted the commission about union infiltration by a well-known civil rights organization, not the KKK.
Also in his 2002 Senate testimony, Pickering tried to portray Gartin as a "progressive" political leader and not a racist. This too, as he grudgingly conceded -- though only in part, under close examination by Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin -- was false. Pickering also insisted that when Gartin ran for governor in 1959, his opponent Ross Barnett was the recognized segregationist candidate and that being insufficiently pro-segregation was why Gartin was defeated. Under Durbin's questioning, Pickering asserted that Gartin's philosophy on segregation was not "as radical as [that of] Ross Barnett."
Maybe most remarkably, in a contentious exchange with Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, Pickering again and again refused to answer questions about whether he left the Democratic Party in 1964 because of the party's belated but brave moves on behalf of integration. Pickering dodged Feingold's questions every way imaginable and never gave an answer.
The Gartin papers provide plenty of answers to all of those questions. First of all, they show why Pickering went to so much trouble to try to play down Gartin's segregationist history, revealing Gartin's previously unknown "conversion" of Pickering to the Republican Party, as part of the lieutenant governor's quiet, behind-the-scenes collaboration with the Mississippi GOP. Gartin himself stayed where most political power was in those years -- he remained a Democrat, sympathetic to segregationist Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, but instrumental in delivering Mississippi resoundingly to Barry Goldwater in 1964.
The new evidence also shows the extent to which Pickering dissembled about Gartin's 1959 campaign. Gartin's papers show that the race pitted two confirmed pro-segregationist candidates against each other, and in his campaign Gartin accused Barnett of being softer on integration than he was. The papers also show that when Gov. Barnett took the most radical stance of his career, over the desegregation of the University of Mississippi, Carroll Gartin stood proudly -- and publicly -- by Barnett's side.
Gartin's papers show conclusively that, contrary to McConnell's description, Pickering himself was one of those "white citizens and politicians who resisted integration and civil rights," not someone working to oppose such forces. Instead of "trying to establish better race relations" in the 1960s, Pickering worked to support segregation, attack civil rights advocates who sought to end Jim Crow, and back those who opposed national civil rights legislation, above all the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Or, in the words of a public statement he signed in 1967, Pickering wanted to preserve "our southern way of life," and he bitterly blamed civil rights workers for stirring up "turmoil and racial hatred" in the South.
In the wake of the Trent Lott debacle, when the Mississippi senator lost his leadership post for publicly praising Strom Thurmond's 1948 segregationist presidential campaign, much was made of the fact that President Bush's criticism helped push Lott to resign. It was said to be the Republican Party's attempt to detach itself from the politics of racial division that's made it acceptable for Southerners like Lott to deliver votes by praising the symbols of their racist past, from Confederate flags to Thurmond's disgraceful Dixiecrat candidacy. And yet within a month of Lott's resignation, Bush re-nominated Pickering, a Lott crony who left the Democratic Party for the same reason Thurmond did -- to protest its support for integration.
The fact that in 1967 Pickering testified, cursorily, against a violent Ku Klux Klan leader -- an incident much cited by his supporters -- hardly offsets his record of supporting segregation. In Jim Crow Mississippi, segregation was preserved thanks to the work of crude and violent racists as well as sophisticated, conservative racists who fought for their goals with different methods. Although sometimes at odds over tactics, both groups bitterly battled efforts to give blacks civil rights. In the 1960s, Charles Pickering, like Carroll Gartin, was one of the sophisticated segregationists -- a fact that he and his backers are now trying to suppress.
