George Bush nominated Ryskamp last year to the influential appeals court covering Florida, Georgia and Alabama. A Miami lawyer chosen by Ronald Reagan to be a federal judge in 1986, Ryskamp would likely have tipped the balance on the appeals court in favor of conservatives. All he had to do was clear the same Senate committee that had unanimously approved him five years earlier. Nominations to the federal courts generally are approved by the Senate with little debate. Bush has had 76 confirmation victories in a row, and the Senate Judiciary Committee hasn’t rejected a court nominee since 1988.
But liberal-interest groups have been looking for a chance to display their strength. That should have put Ryskamp on notice. Instead, he privately complained to an aide to Democratic Sen. Paul Simon that “Miami is like a foreign country” where the store clerks speak Spanish and stock only ethnic food. Cubans, he said, “always show up two hours late” to weddings. In public Ryskamp was no better. Rather than apologize, he tried in his testimony to put racial comments “in context.” In the dog-bite case, he mused on the “irony” that criminals could recover damages if they were mistreated by police. Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr., initially a yea vote, became a nay. He said he was floored by Ryskamp’s “dumbfounding remarks” to his “softball questioning.”
Smelling a chance to embarrass the administration, the liberal groups moved in. Their most important convert was Florida Sen. Bob Graham, a moderate Democrat. Opposition from a home-state senator is rare–and in this case it was “fatal, the game-winning RBI,” conceded one administration official. Graham’s position gave political cover to moderate Democrats like Dennis DeConcini of Arizona and Alabama’s Howell Heflin.
Republican Sen. Alan Simpson of Wyoming called the campaign against Ryskamp a “hatchet job, an execution by people who do not know the man.” More damaging was the administration’s failure to twist arms on behalf of Ryskamp, whose nomination had become more trouble than it is worth. No Bush official ever called Patrick Leahy, a swing vote from Vermont. Attorney General Richard Thornburgh placed a perfunctory call to Biden just minutes before the vote.
As a practical matter, the Bush administration could afford to lose this skirmish, since it’s winning the real contest: control of the federal bench. Bush has 144 more judicial vacancies to go. When these slots are filled, 70 percent of the federal judiciary will be Reagan and Bush appointees–and like Ryskamp, most of them are white, male, wealthy and conservative.
