http://www.illinoistimes.com/gbase/Gyrosite/Content?oid=oid%3A3948"When Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen, perhaps President George W. Bush’s most corporately compromised judicial nominee, appeared early in 2003 before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the most devastating line of questioning she faced did not come from one of the big-name inquisitors on a committee that includes a Kennedy, a Biden, and a Leahy. Rather, Owen was taken down by a mild-mannered Midwesterner with a flair for discovering and exploiting the weaknesses of the Bush administration and its judicial nominees.
Could Owen identify any opinion she had ever written, U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., inquired, “that was politically unpopular with the established power structure in Texas?” As Owen first asked Durbin to explain what he meant by “established power structure,” and then stumbled through a nonanswer that ended with her grumbling about political correctness, you could hear the wheels falling off the bandwagon the administration had tried to create to win approval for their nominee. Even conservative Democratic senators recognized that they were dealing with a conservative judicial activist whose elevation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit would pose a genuine threat to justice in the Deep South and joined a filibuster that ultimately led to the withdrawal of Owen’s nomination.
How did Durbin know that Owen could not answer even the most basic questions about her subservience to political and economic special interests? Because, to a greater extent than any other senator, he has taken seriously the fight against Bush’s most troubling judicial picks: carefully targeting the worst of them, mastering their records and developing lines of questioning meant to illustrate to other Democrats the necessity of rejecting them. “He doesn’t just try to score points,” says Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, the coalition of progressive groups that has been at the forefront of challenges to the Bush administration’s strategy for reshaping the nation’s courts. “He zeroes in on the issues that matter most and then he just starts demanding answers.”
For the most part, Durbin’s filleting of Bush’s judicial nominees has been an obscure pleasure enjoyed mainly by Washington liberal activists who monitor the progress of judicial nominations. But that’s about to change. When the 109th Congress begins to address the Bush agenda in coming days, Durbin — an unassuming 60-year-old everyman with a self-deprecating sense of humor, a willingness to share the spotlight, and a penchant for skipping Washington parties to return to his hometown of Springfield — is quickly emerging as the most aggressive and progressive member of the Senate Democratic leadership. Durbin has challenged the Bush administration on everything from judicial nominations to flu vaccine to torture at Abu Ghraib. He has hit the ground running with votes against attorney-general nominee Alberto Gonzales and secretary-of-state nominee Condoleezza Rice. And there is every indication that he intends to show congressional Democrats how to be something they have not been since Bush assumed the presidency: an effective opposition."
The Illinois Times is great for long articles like this one. Durbin is such a class act.
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