During his campaign for president in 2000, George W. Bush pledged to appoint federal judges in the mold of U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. As difficult as it is to imagine, Bush is seeking to appoint judges to the bench who are even more hostile to civil rights than Scalia and Thomas.

A classic example is Janice Rogers Brown, whom Bush wants to appoint to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. People for the American Way says that on issues involving civil rights, equal opportunity and discrimination, the California Supreme Court justice is “to the right of Thomas and Scalia.”

To fully understand how extreme the California Supreme Court judge is, one needs to remember that she sits on a court where six of the seven members were appointed by Republican governors. Even in that setting, Brown is a lone dissenter.

The Web sites of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (www.civilrights.org), People for the American Way (www.pfaw.org) and Alliance for Justice (www.afj.org) carry detailed examinations of Brown’s opinions, so I will not try to duplicate them in this limited space. At Brown’s confirmation hearing last month, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) reminded her, “In case after case, you come down on the side of denying rights and remedies to the downtrodden and disadvantaged. Oftentimes you ignore established precedent to get there.

— “In a housing discrimination case, you were the only member of your court to find that the California Fair Employment and Housing Commission did not have the authority to award damages to housing discrimination victims.
— “In a disability discrimination case, you were the only member of your court to conclude that due to a technical reading of the law, the victim was not entitled to raise past instances of discrimination that occurred.
— “You are the only member of your court to conclude that age discrimination victims should not have the right to sue under common law – an interpretation that is directly contrary to the will of the California legislature.
— “You were the only member of the California Supreme Court who dissented in a case involving the sale of cigarettes to minors. All the other justices ruled that a corporation can, on behalf of the public, sue a retailer that illegally sells cigarettes to minors under the state’s unfair competition law.
— “You were the only member of the California Supreme Court who would strike down a San Francisco law that provided housing assistance to displaced low-income, elderly, and disabled people.
— “You were the only member of the California Supreme Court who concluded that there was nothing improper about requiring a criminal defendant to wear a 50,000-volt “stun belt” at his trial.
— “You were the only member of the California Supreme Court who voted to overturn the rape conviction of a 17-year-old girl because you felt that the victim gave mixed messages to the rapist.
— “You were the only member of the California Supreme Court who dissented in two rulings that permitted counties to ban guns or gun sales on fairgrounds and other public property.
— “As an appellate court judge, you ruled that paint companies could use Proposition 13 as a shield to avoid paying fees per the Childhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Act—a critical law used to evaluate, screen, and provide medical treatment for children at risk for lead poisoning. The California Supreme Court reversed you unanimously.”

And that’s only part of her sordid record.

Even California Chief Justice Ronald George, a Republican appointee who sided with Brown in an anti-affirmative ruling (“Hi-Voltage Wire Works, Inc. v. City of San Jose”), said her written opinion in the case minimized the existence of racial discrimination.

“The general theme that runs through the majority opinion’s historical discussion—that there is no meaningful distinction between discriminatory racial policies that were imposed for the clear purpose of establishing and preserving racial segregation, on the one hand, and race-conscious affirmative action programs whose aim is to break down or eliminate the continuing effects of such segregation and discrimination, on the other hand—represents a serious distortion of history and does a grave disservice to the sincerely held views of a significant segment of our populace,” he wrote.

Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) argues that Brown “is a conservative African-American woman, and for some, that alone disqualifies her nomination to the D.C. Circuit.”

No, she is unqualified because she has demonstrated that she is unable to put aside her conservative political views and fairly uphold the law.