Vote 'em up or down

IT'S A SAD fact that this week we are commemorating the four-year anniversary of the nominations of Priscilla Owen and Terrence Boyle to be judges on our federal circuit courts. It took less time for America to defeat both Germany and Japan in World War II than it's taken to have one simple up-or-down vote on the current crop of filibustered judges.

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What is occurring in the US Senate is shameful and insulting to the American people. Democrats have set up an unprecedented blockade to deny President Bush's constitutional authority to appoint judges who share his philosophy. Like schoolyard bullies, Senators Harry Reid, Charles Schumer, and Edward M. Kennedy, among others, have threatened to shut down the Senate if they don't get their way. They have also confused the electorate with an array of smoke and mirrors.

The real issues are not about Senate rules, traditions, or even the good reputations of these nominees who are mercilessly slandered and demonized for political gain. What is at stake is the Supreme Court, and whether the justices who are appointed to it will interpret the law and not create it. What is also on the line is the increasing reliance by the court not on the Constitution or legal precedent but on international public opinion.

Liberal sentiment in Western Europe and Canada has nothing to do with the interpretation of American law, but that is what Justice Anthony Kennedy and his colleagues are imposing on us. New appointees to the court must understand that we are governed by a rule of law, not by the vagaries of foreign opinion polls.

To obscure their hidden motives, Senators Schumer, Reid, Kennedy, et al., attack the reputations and beliefs of highly qualified conservative nominees as being ''out of the mainstream." It is ''slash and burn" politics at its worst. Consider Judge Janice Rogers Brown, for example. She's an African-American, the daughter of an Alabama sharecropper, and a California Supreme Court justice who won reelection in that liberal state with 76 percent of the vote. How can a jurist who wins by a landslide in California be condemned as too extremist to serve?

Other well-qualified nominees have been denied a vote simply because they don't meet the left's irreligious litmus test, as in the case of William Pryor, whose ''strongly held beliefs" so frightened Senator Schumer that he didn't see how Pryor could possibly act properly. Schumer's comment was a barely concealed attack against Pryor's Catholic faith.

Other so-called ''extremists," such as Priscilla Owen and Terrence Boyle, have received ''well qualified" ratings by the liberal American Bar Association. Nevertheless, the left continues to paste preposterous labels on them. Americans overwhelmingly (by 81 and 82 percent in two recent polls) agree that even if Senate Democrats disagree with a nominee, they should still allow an up-or-down vote on each one. Can the will of the people be any clearer?

Day by day the hypocrisy of the Democrats in the Senate only grows worse. Their newest ''compromise," aided and abetted by Senator Trent Lott and several of his waffling Republican colleagues, is to allow any four of the seven appellate nominees to proceed, in exchange for Republican promises to preserve the filibuster. What a deal! For Monopoly players, that is like offering to trade Park Place and Boardwalk for Baltic and Mediterranean. If the Democrats are willing to allow any of the seven to proceed, then they are tacitly admitting that all are qualified to serve. And if they are all qualified, they all ought to be given the courtesy of a vote.

Never in the history of the Senate has a federal judge nominee with obvious majority support in the Senate been held hostage to a filibuster, as the Democrats are doing to the president's choices. By their actions, the liberals have degraded the Senate as an institution and dragged through the gutter the good names and the reputations of the courageous men and women who have allowed themselves to be pawns in this nasty game. In the parlance of the 1990s, this is ''the politics of personal destruction."

Give every appellate court nominee the courtesy of an up or down vote. They deserve no less!

James C. Dobson is founder and chairman of Focus on the Family.