Priscilla "Queen of the Filibuster" Owen

Raw Story has a nice little ditty on the absurdity of Frist's making judicial nominee Priscilla Owen the poster child for the anti-filibuster folks.

Owen is a perplexing selection as a poster-woman for the uber-right’s
destroy the judiciary campaign because, of the handful of judges whose
nominations have been affected by Senate filibusters, she may be the most unappealing on the basis of her record. She is such a judicial
extremist that even conservative Republicans often don’t support her—in
the most ironic case, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who served with
Owen on the Texas Supreme Court, singled her opinions out in eleven of
his dissents, decrying her “unconscionable act of judicial activism,” in
one case.

Owen won her spot on the Texas Supreme Court in 1994 (an elected
position) by using that old White House friend Karl Rove as a campaign
consultant. From her first days on the bench, Owen went out of her way to
engage in the type of judicial legislating with which Republicans are
forever charging Democrats—in one of the most controversial cases, trying
to make it even harder for minors to have abortions in Texas than the
Texas Legislature wrote into the law at issue before her. It was in that
case that Gonzalez, a conservative Republican with right-wing credentials sufficientfor him to have filled John Ashcroft’s shoes, wrote a scathing
opinion detailing his horror at the unprincipled way in which she
approaches the law.

Owen is not held in high esteem by her peers—the most recent American Bar Association survey of Texas jurists showed that more (47%) deem her
performance on the bench “poor” as compared to any other judge in the
state, with particularly terrible marks with regards to whether she is,
“Impartial and open-minded with respect to determining the legal issues.”
She has won zero support among Democrats in the Senate, and is not a
favorite of many Senate Republicans as well. She is the first nominee to
ever be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then re-nominated
by the president—so Frist’s characterization that a Democratic filibuster
is keeping her from office is plainly erroneous; Owen would not even be up
for nomination again if Bush wasn’t grimly and doggedly determined to force
her through the confirmation process, “advice and consent” be damned.

Yes, that's just who we need in the Federal Courts. Anyone. Yes, anyone, whether they are an evangelical christian, a mainstream christian, a pagan, a jew, a raped mule, or a sodomized doggie would find this choice reprehensible. And the fact that Frist and the gang are supporting her just shows how insane these people are.