That’s the title of my new Confirmation Tales post, which begins:

“The assault was so easy,” observed reporter Stephen Henderson. “Take a white, conservative, religious judicial nominee from Mississippi. Pluck a few votes from his career in the state Senate, a handful of cases from his time on the bench. And then use them to brand him as an enemy of racial progress.”
So it was that liberal groups drove Democratic senators to oppose President George W. Bush’s nomination in 2001 of Charles W. Pickering to a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.
The battle over Bush’s nomination of Miguel Estrada has enduring significance because Senate Democrats in 2003 dramatically escalated the confirmation wars by resorting to the filibuster to defeat it. But Pickering has the distinction of being the first Bush nominee to have been subjected to the Left’s full-scale attack.
That attack illustrated several lessons. First, liberal groups would dictate to Senate Democrats which nominees to oppose. Second, the Left would wield the race card even against nominees with admirable, if not heroic, records on race. Third, the Left aimed to make a nominee’s personal pro-life convictions disqualifying. Fourth, every confirmation fight was a proxy battle over the next Supreme Court nomination.

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