Janice Rogers Brown, now serving on the California Supreme Court, is nominated to the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The Washington Post has described her as "one of the most unapologetically ideological nominees of either party in many years," and her record shows why. Even though the California Supreme Court contains six Republicans and one Democrat, Justice Brown has dissented more than a third of the time, and has often been the only dissenter. As a judge, she has written that courts may not bar racial slurs in the workplace and questioned whether women subjected to verbal sexual harassment can legally challenge it at all. She recently questioned the long-standing legal rule that prosecutors cannot discriminate against African-American women in jury selection.
In speeches she has given, she called the New Deal—the era of FDR that brought us the Social Security system and worker protections like the minimum wage and child labor laws—a “socialist revolution.” In another apparent reference to Social Security, she said that today's senior citizens "cannibalize" their grandchildren.
Her fellow Justices have criticized her for her willingness to distort the facts and the law in judicial opinions. In one case about affirmative action, the Republican-appointed Chief Justice of her court called her opinion "a serious distortion of history."
