comment in the article by Craig
McDonald:
How did Gonzales, who as White House counsel heads the
Bush Administration's screening committee on judicial
appointments, wind up on the cheerleading squad for an
appeals court nominee whose extremism he scored barely
two years ago? That's easy. Gonzales is not in charge on
this one. "Owen," explains Craig McDonald,
director of the nonpartisan group Texans for Public
Justice, "is a Karl Rove special."
Rove, the political Svengali who ran George W. Bush's
presidential campaign and parlayed that experience into a
taxpayer-funded job as White House senior adviser, has
orchestrated Owen's rapid rise ever since he plucked her
from a gig as an undistinguished hired gun for
Transcontinental Gas Pipe Line and other energy firms to
make her his pet judicial candidate. Back in 1994 the man
whom Lone Star pols still refer to as "Bush's
brain" wanted to make the state's top court
politically friendly for the man he was about to make
governor. Owen seemed suitably pliable, and with Rove
guiding her campaign, the political unknown who in
sixteen years as a corporate lawyer was the sole counsel
on only four cases that were tried to a verdict was
suddenly a Texas Supreme Court justice. Now Rove is
determined to place his protÈgÈe on one of the most
influential appeals court benches in the land. This
confirmation crusade is not about Owen, who has never
been anything more than a political pawn for the nation's
premier GOP operative. It's not even about Rove's desire
to exact revenge for the Senate Judiciary Committee's
rejection of Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering's
nomination to serve on the Fifth Circuit. Rather, Rove is
working to win the fight to confirm Owen in order to send
a powerful signal to movement conservatives about this
Administration's determination to pack the courts with
judicial activists who are willing to challenge
antidiscrimination laws, upset basic protections for
workers and consumers, and, above all, build a judicial
infrastructure that will eventually overturn abortion
rights. "Clearly," says McDonald, "Rove
picked her as a favor to the right wing because she is
the darling of the right wing."
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