Judge Smith Goes to Washington

STANDING IN THE MIDDLE of Room 226 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on February 26, 2002, waiting for Wisconsin senator Russell Feingold to convene a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the nomination of a federal circuit court judge, I'm told how the choreography will work. Nan, it is explained to me by someone who has just spoken to her (this would be Nan Aron, the head of the left-leaning interest group that amusingly styles itself the Alliance for Justice), will walk into the hearing room and stay in the back for a bit as Feingold "chairs" the hearing. She might walk around. She will be noticed. Then she will leave--her movements and time in the room signaling the degree of interest she has in defeating the nominee.

The people who will note this will be at the front of the room--Democratic senators and their Judiciary Committee staff. Along with People for the American Way's Ralph Neas (whose website boasts of him as "the 101st Senator") and the Community Rights Counsel's Douglas Kendall, Aron is a leader of a battery of liberal groups committed to exerting iron-fisted control over the Senate Judiciary Committee's confirmation process for federal judges.

Their target this particular day is my college friend, David Brookman Smith. At 50, Brooks is now the sitting chief judge of the U.S. District Court for Western Pennsylvania. He is here this morning for his confirmation hearing as President Bush's nominee for the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

So too are a number of other people. Suffice it to say we are not the usual crowd. A mix of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Gore supporters, Pennsylvanians all, the majority are lawyers. I am not a lawyer; I am present this morning simply because of my friendship with Brooks Smith. But I know what lies ahead for my friend. This fair-minded, mainstream jurist (promoted by the late John Heinz and Arlen Specter, moderate Republican senators both), with 14 years of impeccable service as a Reagan-appointed federal district judge ("sterling" in the words of a Clinton U.S. attorney), is about to be relentlessly attacked on all fronts. The assault will be coordinated by a powerful Washington clique whose political identity has slowly evolved from liberal idealist to thuggish practitioner of character assassination, distortion, demagoguery, intimidation, and outright lies insistently repeated in prosecutorial fashion. When a sufficiently damning all-purpose smear sticks, it will be deployed by dutiful senators, Senate staff, and media alike. Worse, precisely because Brooks is a judge, he will not be allowed to respond.

Weeks before his hearing, concerned that the White House seemed politically absent from the fight for its judicial nominees even as the telltale signs of a smear campaign are appearing on the Web, I call Brooks. In a conversation only old friends can have, I tell him that while he may have to sit on the sidelines in his own confirmation fight, I do not. I am a private citizen--and I want the phone numbers of any two of his lawyer friends in Pittsburgh. By Saturday afternoon, February 9--the same day the budding assault on Brooks moves from the Web to the news pages of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette--the Brooks Smith war room is being hot-wired into existence.

As I begin spending countless hours on the phone with Pittsburgh attorneys, one eagerly sending me on to another, Republican fury at the treatment of Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, and Bush I nominees is more than matched by Democratic bitterness over Clinton nominees denied hearings or votes. There are a lot of angry Pennsylvania lawyers out there, liberals and conservatives alike. They are indignant about the treatment of their peers, the lack of good faith in the process--and in their view it is starting to happen yet again. This time to Brooks Smith, someone they all admire and respect. To a person, they want to do something for Brooks and begin reforming the judicial confirmation process.