Some of what's wrong with Pickering

Jeffrey St. Clair: Under the White Robe, The Ghosts of Pickering's Past
The wonder is that Pickering's lifelong association with racists and his own ante-bellum views on blacks and civil rights were not thrown back in his face in 1990 when Pickering appeared before the senate to lobby for his seat on the federal bench. At the time, the Democrats controlled the senate and mighty Joe Biden (and Ted Kennedy) ruled the Judiciary Committee. They let Pickering slide through with barely a thought. Here we are presented once again with the noxious consequences of senate comity, wherein supposed champions of civil rights such as Biden and Kennedy simply defer to the wishes of the likes of Trent Lott in exchange for similar deference when it comes to their own personal picks for federal judgeships. Apparently, it doesn't matter if another full-blown racist dons federal robes in southern Mississippi.

But Pickering has done plenty of damage since he ascended to the federal bench, where his evident animus toward blacks has surfaced again and again in his rulings and opinions. In a case called Fairley v. Forrest County, Pickering lashed out against the one-man/one-vote doctrine as "obtrusive". In another case, Citizens Right to Vote v. Morgan, Pickering characterized the Voting Rights Act as "an unnecessary intrusion" of federal authority into matters that the states are "perfectly capable of resolving." This is perverse legal reasoning to say the least, since the federal role that Pickering is carping about came about only after Mississippi's voting procedures had been ruled repeatedly to be racist and unconstitutional.

Pickering has proved to be equally harsh in his rulings in cases involving minorities suits over employment discrimination. Indeed, Pickering has demonstrated an unrelenting hostility toward the very idea of such claims. In a case known as Seeley v. City of Hattiesburg, Pickering set forth an argument that might even make Antonin Scalia cringe. In dismissing a claim brought by a black worker, Pickering wrote that "the federal courts must never become safe havens for employees who are in a class protected from discrimination, but who in fact are employees who are derelict in their duties."