Yesterday, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to approve the nomination of Georgetown Law professor Cornelia “Nina” Pillard to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which is often considered to be the nation’s second-highest court. The party-line vote wasn’t exactly a surprise – Republicans have decided they don’t want President Obama to fill any of the D.C. Circuit’s three vacancies, so have voted against both nominees who have come before them so far – but the content of at least some GOP senators' objections to Pillard was notable.
Specifically, both Republican senators who chose to speak on their decision to vote against Pillard went out of their way to object to Pillard’s record on women’s equality.
Yes, the Republican “rebranding” effort is going so well that they are now threatening to hold up a judicial nominee because she believes that men and women should be equal in the eyes of the law and has been very successful in arguing that view in the courts.
Pillard has a long record of working with Republicans and Democrats to defend women’s equality: She worked with the Bush administration to successfully defend the Family and Medical Leave Act in the Supreme Court and crafted the arguments that convinced the Supreme Court to open the Virginia Military Institute to women (which earned her the respect of, among others, the head of the school who was at the time opposed to allowing women in).
She also has worked on women’s equality issues as an academic, including questioning abstinence-only education that presents a double standard to boys and girls…which is what has sent the far right into a fit.
At yesterday's committee vote on Pillard’s nomination, both Sen. Chuck Grassley (the ranking Republican on the committee) and Sen. Orrin Hatch lifted talking points from right-wing activists like the Family Research Council, Phyllis Schlafly and Ed Whelan of the National Review to attack the nominee’s academic writings on reproductive rights and abstinence education and to even, bizarrely, question whether she appreciates the “benefits of marriage.”
And then every single Republican on the committee voted against allowing her nomination to go to the full Senate for a vote.
To put this in context, Republican senators including Grassley and Hatch were quick to defend demand the confirmation of George W. Bush judicial nominees who made rape jokes and belonged to clubs that excluded women and espoused any number of offensive views, claiming that they could hold these personal views and still be fair judges. As PFAW's Drew Courtney wrote in the Huffington Post yesterday:
Too often we're told that judicial nominations fights are too complicated, too subtle to get major national attention. Not this time. The Republican message is crystal clear: rape-joke making, gay-bashing, abuse-defending, discrimination-supporting, law-skirting, ideology-pushing Republican men are welcome to be judges in our federal courts.
Women who expect to be treated as equals are not.
