OPEN MEMO TO DEMS IN DC:
You guys gotta reframe the Owen debate- focus on her devotion to big corporate money, and how she kept an SEVERLY INJURED boy in limbo after he was injured in a car accident involving a defective seat belt.
Forget about her Anti-Abortion stance, you only get the base on that...
90% of the public believe corruption and allowing a family to linger in pain is wrong. You guys can win this play, just be as FIERCE as the Republicans would be if they were in your spot.
Play like champs and win!
SOURCE:
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/11/ma_564_01.html
"...The conflicts this created were on full display in the case of Priscilla Owen, now a Bush nom- inee to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. When she first decided in the early 1990s that she wanted to run for a spot on the Texas Supreme Court, she called on Ralph Wayne, president of the Texas Civil Justice League, a trade group formed by the state's manufacturing, transportation, and energy industries. "I said, 'Have you talked to Karl Rove?'" Wayne remembers. "She said, 'No, but I think I should.'"
After Rove met with Wayne and Owen, he signed on, giving the candidate the seal of approval from the state's corporate establishment. The money followed. Owen raised $1.1 million for her successful 1994 state Supreme Court campaign, with a rec- ord 21 percent coming directly from the business community and much more coming from corporate defense lawyers. Judge Owen later repaid the favor, in part, by lending her endorsement to a Texas Civil Justice League fundraising appeal.
By the time Rove was done, the last Democrat had been purged from the Texas Supreme Court. "The cases all started getting decided anti-consumer, on the side of big business," says Phil Hardberger, a retired Texas appellate court judge who is a Democrat. Jury verdicts, once embraced by the Democratic court, were now overturned or reduced. By the 1997-98 term, defendants were winning 69 percent of the time, and insurance companies, doctors, and pharmaceutical firms were winning nearly every case. Owen consistently distinguished herself as one of the conservative court's most strident conservatives. In one decision, Owen argued unsuccessfully in support of a water-quality exemption tailored for an Austin land developer who had given $2,500 to her campaign. The court major-ity dismissed her contention as "nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric."
SOURCE:http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/05/12/priscilla_owen/index_np.html
May 12, 2005 | Willie Searcy never got to meet Priscilla Owen. And that's unfortunate. Because as an associate justice on the Texas Supreme Court, Owen once exercised almost complete control over the fate of the working-class kid who always played above his weight on the local rec-league football team -- until the car accident that changed his life and crossed his path with Owen's. The account of Willie Searcy's experience with the Texas high court provides real insight into what sort of federal appeals court judge Owen will be if the Senate approves her lifetime nomination to the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. But Searcy's story has been largely overlooked.
Next week, Majority Leader Bill Frist may call up Owen's nomination for Senate consideration, a move expected to spark the long-awaited showdown over the so-called nuclear option. Owen's Democratic opponents, who have blocked her nomination since 2001, have been focused on her creative attempts to restrict abortion rights for minors in Texas. That also goes for the extreme Christian right, which considers Owen's "pro-life" record a justification for its campaign to persuade the Republican majority in the U.S. Senate to eliminate the filibuster rule and confirm Owen. Yet the case that pitted the skinny black kid from Dallas against Ford Motor Co. is as important as Owen's attempt to rewrite the law the Texas Legislature enacted to define a specific process by which minors could get abortions. (Not, as Owen held, to make such abortions almost impossible to obtain.)