A nominee who interjects personal beliefs into rulings...activist judge...
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/18/politics/18brown.html
Last month as Bill Frist spoke to a religious rally Justice Sunday, one Bush judicial nominee, Janice Rogers Brown of the Supreme Court of California delivered a message more direct than Dr. Frist's, saying religious values in America were imperiled by "an increasingly secular culture."
Speaking in CT to Catholic lawyers and judges, she said: "These are perilous times for people of faith. Not in the sense that we are going to lose our lives, but in the sense that it will cost you something if you are a person of faith who stands up for what you believe in and say those things out loud."
More below
Not qualified?
"Like Justice Thomas, Justice Brown received a mixed rating from the American Bar Association panel that evaluated her for the federal bench, with a majority finding her qualified and a minority unqualified.
This is not the first time that Ms. Brown, 55, has faced such criticism. When Gov. Pete Wilson nominated her to the State Supreme Court in 1996, the state bar panel found her unqualified. Besides saying she did not have enough judicial experience, the 27-member committee said that in her 18 months on a lower court bench she had improperly injected her political philosophy into her opinions, in substance and in language.
The Supreme Court case cited most often for the idea that Justice Brown might inject her views into court opinions is San Remo Hotel v. San Francisco in 2002. The majority upheld a requirement, intended to maintain low-cost housing, that owners pay a fee to demolish a residential hotel. In her dissent, Justice Brown said the city had engaged in theft of the property. "Theft is theft even when the government approves of the thievery," she wrote. "Turning a democracy into a kleptocracy does not enhance the stature of the thieves, it only diminishes the legitimacy of the government."
In 2000, Justice Brown wrote the principal opinion enforcing Proposition 209, which prohibits affirmative action programs. Although her colleagues agreed with the conclusion, some refused to join the opinion, saying she had gone too far and had used needlessly scathing language.
Justice Brown also wrote with emotion when she was the lone dissenter in a case that upheld the conviction of a black man arrested in Los Angeles for drug possession after being stopped for riding his bicycle in the wrong direction and not having a driver's license. The man, Conrad Richard McKay, was sentenced to 32 months in jail for possession of methamphetamine.
Although the other six members of the court said the search was within the officer's discretion, Justice Brown wrote, "Mr. McKay was sentenced to a prison term for the trivial public offense of riding a bicycle the wrong way on a residential street," saying she was sure that it would not have occurred in several wealthier neighborhoods in the city.
"Anecdotal evidence and empirical studies," her opinion said, "confirm that what most people suspect and what many people of color know from experience is a reality: there is an undeniable correlation between law enforcement stop-and-search practices and the racial characteristics of the driver."
Justice Brown has also faced criticism for sometimes fiery speeches. In April 2000, she said at a meeting of the Federalist Society at the University of Chicago Law School, "Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates and ability to control our own destiny atrophies."
A result, she said, "is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible."
Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, asked her at a hearing, "You really believe that?"
Justice Brown dismissed the significance of the words, saying they were "just speeches." Justice Brown said she was "simply stirring the pot a little bit, getting people to think, to challenge them." "
Not the best and the brightest, not the best for the country, not the best for our future...but the best for the religious right...