In a dusty Arizona town where I once worked, the migrant lettuce pickers would get liquored up after a hard day in the fields and go after each other with knives. It was ugly.

        Just like the bar brawl at the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals, when migrant judges from Tennessee, Michigan, Kentucky and Ohio come to town carrying old grudges. The difference is that judges get drunk on power and fight with razor-sharp words.

        The rumble erupted over a ruling in favor of affirmative action quotas at the University of Michigan.

The toast test

        The case itself can't pass the toast test:

        No matter which side you butter, burned toast is still burned toast. And no matter how the lawyers spread on lofty talk about “promoting diversity,” race quotas are still discrimination and still wrong.

        How the court could waste years on this case and come up with the wrong answer is a mystery. But the U.S. Supreme Court will probably reverse the ruling.

        The surprise is how the judges squared off with opinions like broken bottles.

        It was conservatives appointed by Reagan and Bush vs. the Carter and Clinton liberals.

        Conservative Judge Danny Boggs accused the liberals of rigging the panel that handled the case. His Procedural Appendix was a punch in the spleen. It said the liberals concealed motions and stalled the case until two conservative judges were unable to vote on the final 5-4 decision.

        “Under these circumstances, it is impossible to say what the result would have been had this case been handled in accordance with our long-established rules,” he wrote.

        Liberal Judge Karen Nelson Moore replied with an opinion like brass knuckles.

Over the top

        “I believe that Judge Boggs and those joining his opinion have done a grave harm not only to themselves, but to this court and even to the nation as a whole,” she wrote. Their argument was “baseless,” “shameful,” “inaccurate and misleading.”

        She pounded Judge Boggs for exposing the infighting to the public.

        But for all her hyperbole and insults, Judge Moore's defense did not rebut the facts: The liberals broke the court's own rules.

        And it was not the first time. Last December, Judge Nathaniel Jones broke the rules to engineer a liberal takeover to prevent the execution of John Byrd. His hearings to review “new” evidence turned into a circus and proved Judge Boggs' assertion that the delay had the credibility of “a hotdog menu.”

        The feud still simmers.

        The deep ideological divide is aggravated by U.S. Senate Democrats, who have blocked President Bush's appointments to fill eight vacancies on the court.

        Liberals have the upper hand for now — and they're using it to twist the rules and manipulate decisions.

        What a flock of hypocrites. They look down on the rest of us from their lifetime perch and dictate the rules and laws we have to obey — while they break their own rules to block capital punishment or support affirmative action.

        We'd be better off settling our disputes with lettuce pickers in robes.

        E-mail: pbronson@enquirer.com. Past columns at Enquirer.com/columns/bronson

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