Bully and Thug By Jeffrey Lord

"Monica Goodling shrugged.

There wasn't, she explained, much that she could do to help me.

The scene: the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, February 26, 2002. The occasion: Senate confirmation hearings for Bush Third Circuit judicial nominee D. Brooks Smith. Smith was at the time the sitting Chief Judge of the Western District of Pennsylvania, where he had served since his appointment by Ronald Reagan fourteen years earlier.

At the time I had put aside a writing career to assist in the confirmation of Judge Smith, an old friend from college days. In an earlier life I had been a political director in the Reagan White House, our office tasked with working on the Senate confirmations of five Reagan Supreme Court nominees, most notably what became the infamous fight over Judge Robert Bork. With that particular arcane experience in my background, I had gotten back into the fray to help Smith, working with a quickly assembled group of Smith supporters from Pennsylvania, many of them Democrats and leading women attorneys appalled at the sudden political gauntlet the heretofore popular and uncontroversial Judge Smith was being forced to run -- a confirmation process run by the iron-fisted hand of Judiciary Chairman Senator Patrick Leahy."

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