Why they want Priscilla Owen

From TruthMissle:


I just saw Bill Frist's Justice Sunday speech...

They don't want Priscilla Owen because she's anti-abortion - it's because she is 100% Pro-Business and Insurance...they can't sell her as a shill for big money lobbyists, so they sell her as "pro-life" - whatever that means...

From the AFL-CIO...

"...During her tenure on the Texas Supreme Court, Justice Owen’s decisions and dissents have overwhelmingly favored business and insurance interests over those of working families. She has authored or joined numerous opinions making it more difficult for workers to pursue their right to compensation for workplace injuries, to seek redress for employment discrimination, and to seek justice for wrongs suffered by them on the job. In addition, she has shown herself to be a conservative judicial activist with a disturbing willingness to ignore the plain language of the law to reach her decisions."

http://truthmissile.blogspot.com/2005/04/priscilla-owen.html

and a long article on her was in the New Yorker a few years back.

If I remember correctly, she was at one point censured for one of the most ridiculous opinions in Texas judicial history.

(Wish I could remember what that was.)

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Here's an excellent resource for nominated judges/justices . . . http://www.independentjudiciary.com/nominees/ including

Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen
Nominated to: U.S. Court of Appeals, 5th Circuit
Status of nomination: Renominated 1/7/03; Pending Senate Floor
Renominated 2/14/2005; Voted out of Committee on 03/27/2003
There have been four failed cloture votes: May 1, 2003; May 8, 2003; July 28, 2003; and November 14, 2003

And, here's more on Texas Supreme Court Justice Owen:

"ROUTINELY BACKS CORPORATIONS AGAINST WORKER AND CONSUMER PROTECTIONS
• Justice Owen reliably votes to throw out jury verdicts favoring workers and consumers against corporate interests and dismisses suits brought by workers for job-related injuries, discrimination and unfair employment practices. She has cast many such votes in dissent, with even her conservative colleagues – including former colleagues, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Senator John Cornyn – finding for the injured parties. If Justice Owen’s views had become law: employees would have to endure almost limitless abusive behavior from their bosses to maintain a valid lawsuit; a teenager paralyzed in a car accident due to a faulty restraint system would not have been allowed to sue in Texas courts; a vacuum cleaner manufacturer that failed to conduct a background check before hiring a salesman with a history of sexual misconduct could not be held liable for the salesman’s on-the-job rape of a prospective customer; the Texas civil rights statute would require an employee to carry the near impossible burden of proving that discrimination was the exclusive reason for her dismissal, rather than a 'motivating factor'; and a developer could have bypassed a city’s water quality laws on the grounds that they infringed on its constitutional rights. In the water pollution case, the court’s majority stated:

'Most of Justice Owen’s dissent is nothing more than inflammatory rhetoric and thus merits no response.' ”

"A LAW-MAKING ACTIVIST, NOT A LAW-INTERPRETING JUDGE, IN ABORTION CASES
• Prior to her original nomination, in each of the many cases that came before her involving Texas’ Parental Notification Act, Justice Owen voted against allowing a minor to obtain an abortion without notifying her parents, often ignoring the law’s explicit exceptions. In one case, she advocated requiring a minor to show an awareness of the 'philosophic, moral, social and religious arguments that can be brought to bear' before obtaining judicial approval for an abortion without parental consent. The statute contains no such requirement.
• Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, when he was one of Justice Owen’s colleagues on the Texas Supreme Court, criticized Justice Owen in another case for attempting to re-write the parental notification statute, calling her dissent 'an unconscionable act of judicial activism.' "

http://www.independentjudiciary.com/nominees/nominee.cfm?NomineeID=21
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Is Scalia auditioning for the Chief Justice's job?
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It's well-known that in and around the time that Dumbya was Governor of TX, there was a ground-swell of corporations kicking-in to the campaign coffers of the Texas Supreme Court judges.

Yup, in TX the state highest court is e-l-e-c-t-e-d which leaves a lot of room for CEOs and other corporate principals to taint the state judges. As a result, the Texas Supreme Court was filled with http://austin.about.com/library/weekly/aa102800a.htm">pro-corporate hacks, and still is too. In addition, Governor George Walker Bush, appointed, several Texas Supreme Court judges where vacancies required him to do so u/TX constitution. Overall, Bush appointed corporate hacks! No surprise.

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"Liberal court decisions had resulted in an unfair
legal system, tilted in favor of personal injury
trial lawyers, unfortunately making Texas a great
place for people to sue one another. I wanted Texas
to be a great place to do business, an entrepreneurial
heaven, where dreamers and doers felt comfortable
risking capital and creating jobs, not a haven for
frivolous lawsuits. — GWBush defining “Texas Justice”
as it cuts off plaintiffs rights in GWBush's presidential
campaign book, co-authored by Karen Hughes that was not
too subtly entitled A Charge to Keep (which, in turn, is
a quote from an Evangelical hymn "associated with a Bible
verse, 1 Corinthians 4:2: 'Now it is required that those
who have been given a trust must prove faithful.',"
page 25.)
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:) about the Texas Supreme Court. Insurance companies AWAYS win there.

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Yes. Indeed. And you can thank then Governor George W. Bush, his guru Karl Rove, followed by the Tom DeLays within Texas for tainting their own Texas Supreme Court with their political agenda. It's no secret.

However, what I cannot understand is why Texas is not uprising against such blatant injustices, overall? Don't Texans have any backbones?

Now, it's a federal *case* . . . yup. Those very same bastard Texans want to spread their cheap-suit to all of us! Bush in the whitehouse is successfully packing the U.S. federal court system w/ more of his kiss-ass ideologues in order to turn back the legal clock to the late 1800s when corporations ran supreme and people had no "civil rights," no individual rights, and the Bill of Rights was used by corporate whores to wipe their asses.


And, "Lady Justice" scales will be tipped into the coffers of corporations
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and that is why the BFEE doesn't want Roe v. Wade overturned, because then the fundies won't have a cause to rally around and won't help push through these people.

That's an interesting possibility I'd never considered before