By Ray Cooklis
Cincinnati Enquirer

All but lost beside the Senate filibuster of supposed "stealth nominee" Miguel Estrada has been the bid of Ohio Supreme Court Justice Deborah Cook for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. Until this week. A Tuesday New York Times opinion piece by Adam Cohen used out-of-context distortions and ad hominem hyperbole to attack Cook as a dissent-happy judge who favors "abusive bosses" and is hostile to injured workers, consumers and discrimination victims.

On Thursday, Judiciary Committee Democrats took their Pavlovian cue and demanded that Cook and D.C. Circuit nominee John Roberts face further hearings instead of being voted upon. They failed. Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, forced a vote that Cook won 12-2, with several Democrats voting "present." In the process, Hatch got into a shouting match with erstwhile buddy Ted. Kennedy, D-Mass., whose mantra has been that Bush nominees want to roll back protections for workers, the disabled, minorities and yadayada.

The logic: There's a case in which, say, a disabled person is a party. The judge believes the law does not support that person's position. Therefore, the judge is an enemy of all disabled persons, a scoundrel who takes perverse satisfaction in sending "hapless victims home empty-handed," in Cohen's Dickensian phrase.

Well, this is a moronic way to view the judicial process. At this level of appeal, judges are dealing with issues of law and precedent that affect far more than one case. They are not amenable to simplistic Judge Judy rulings that give you a warm glow. "This 'results-oriented' view of cases," Cook told the committee, "is an affront to democracy and the oath we take to administer justice without regard to persons."

If Cook were a demonstrably weak or uninformed legal mind, that would be one thing. But as Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, pointed out in Cook's Jan. 29 hearing, Cook had only a 1.4 percent reversal rate in more than 1,000 Ohio Court of Appeals opinions. And in the five Ohio Supreme Court rulings reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court since she was elected to the state's high court in 1994, the nation's top justices agreed with Cook's position all five times. In four of the five cases, they reversed Ohio rulings with which Cook had dissented.

Obviously, Senate Democrats detest Cook because her opinions are clearly correct far more often than they would like.