On a hot day in June, the grandson of a bank president took to the floor of the Senate to denounce the daughter of sharecroppers. “I feel compelled to rise on this issue to express, in the strongest terms, my opposition to the nomination of Janice Rogers Brown to the DC Circuit,” Senator Obama said.
Born in segregated Alabama, Janice Rogers Brown had been a leftist like Obama before becoming conservative. When Obama rose to denounce the respected African-American jurist for her political views it had been almost a full two years since President Bush had nominated her in the summer of ’03.
Obama had arrived a few months earlier on his way to the White House and was eager to impress his left-wing backers with his political radicalism. He held forth complaining that Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who had gone to segregated schools and become the first African-American woman on the California Supreme Court, was guilty of “an unyielding belief in an unfettered free market.”
And he filibustered Judge Brown, along with other nominee, trying to deny them a vote.
“She has equated altruism with communism. She equates even the most modest efforts to level life’s playing field with somehow inhibiting our liberty,” he fumed.
Brown, who due to her family background knew far more of slavery than Obama, had indeed warned about the dangers of a powerful government. “In the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate — the drug of choice — for multinational corporations and single moms, for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.”