ConfirmThem

By AndrewHyman Comments () / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

On Fox News today, Senator Schumer mischaracterized the presidents' judicial nominees:

Here let me just tell you now about some of the people we've blocked. One nominee said slavery was God's gift to white people. Another said the purpose of a woman is to be subjugated to a man. One nominee said that there should be no zoning laws. If you have a nice house in a suburban community and somebody bought the house next to you and put in a factory with a smokestack that was polluting, that's not taking of property. And my favorite, one of their nominees said that the whole New Deal was a Socialist revolution, and we ought to go back to the 1890s. No labor laws, no wages and hours laws...

You wouldn't know it from Schumer's nationally televised smear campaign, but he was actually referring to only two nominees, one of whom was confirmed rather than blocked.

J. Leon Holmes is the one who made remarks about slavery and women, and he was confirmed because his remarks about slavery and women were not what Schumer claims. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that any nominee favoring slavery, and favoring subjugation of women, never would have been confirmed by a majority of the U.S. Senate.

The other nominee whom Schumer is referring to is California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown. Regarding the New Deal, Brown merely said what friends and associates of FDR acknowledged. And regarding zoning laws, Schumer is alluding to a case where Justice Brown used the word "kleptocracy" to describe how the City of San Francisco had behaved. Here's a description of the case:

In the San Remo Hotel case, the City imposed a $567,000 fee under the Hotel Conversion Ordinance (HCO) as a condition of a permit allowing tourist use of the hotel. The Field brothers, who own the hotel, spent three years in administrative proceedings followed by eleven years in both state and federal court challenging that fee. Along the way, one of five dissenting SF Supervisors called the HCO fee "organized extortion," the state Court of Appeal called the HCO fee "ransom," and one of three dissenting state Supreme Court Justices declared that the HCO demonstrated that private property is "extinct" in San Francisco and that the local government is a "kleptocracy." Nevertheless, at the end of the Field brothers' 14-year odyssey, a 4-3 vote of the California Supreme Court and the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals approved the HCO fee, holding that the Board of Supervisors had a "rational basis" for adopting the HCO. (A Deputy City Attorney called the "rational basis" test a "straight face test", i.e., can a lawyer stand up in court and state the Board's reasons for adopting the ordinance without laughing.) The courts rejected the Field brothers' arguments that a more stringent test was required to prevent an unconstitutional taking and that the huge fee the City demanded was disproportionate to any harm that would be caused by the tourist use allowed by the permit.

This case does not deal with a situation where a zoning law reduces property value, as Schumer suggested. It has to do with selling variances for more than a half million dollars apiece. Let us hope that the junior Senator from New York is not learning to emulate the senior Senator.