For a Woman to Get that Federal Court Nomination, Does She Have to be Scalia in a Skirt?
President Bush changes the way federal judges are chosen, looking to ideology as a major factor in their selection. Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen has friends in high places– White House Counsel Alberto R. Gonzales, once her colleague on the state’s highest court, and Bush advisor Karl Rove, who was intimately involved in her campaign when she first ran for election in 1994. Perhaps that explains why President Bush recently renominated the ultraconservative to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit after the Senate Judiciary Committee defeated her nomination last September. In the old Senate, the Democrats had the clout to stop a nomination like Owen’s in its tracks. That’s much less likely to happen now, with Republicans controlling the Senate, albeit by a slim majority, 51-49. With the GOP holding sway over both the legislative and executive branches, Bush is now positioned to make good on his campaign promise to appoint conservative judges in the mold of Suprem
