Family Group Blasts Ohio Senator for His Role in Recent Judicial 'Compromise'

by Chad Groening and Jody Brown
May 25, 2005

(AgapePress) - An Ohio pro-family activist says it may be time for Republican Senator Mike DeWine to come home. That observation comes in response to outrage being expressed in the Buckeye State over DeWine's participation in the recent bi-partisan "compromise" on judicial nominees.

After waiting more than four years for a vote, Priscilla Owen has been approved by the full Senate for the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The confirmation vote was 56-43, mostly along party lines. The vote brings to a close a long wait for the 50-year-old jurist who, since her nomination in 2001, had withstood nine hours of hearings, answered more than 500 questions, and endured 22 days of floor debate.

Owen is the first "beneficiary" of the controversial deal struck earlier this week by a coalition of seven Republican senators and seven Democrats. Under the arrangement, Owen and two other judicial nominees -- Janice Rogers Brown and William Pryor -- were to be granted an up-or-down vote before the Senate, while Senate Democrats were to retain the option of using the filibuster under "extraordinary circumstances."

Conservatives roundly criticized the arrangement, some describing it as a "betrayal" of those who helped to elect many of the Republicans involved in a pact that preserves Democrats' filibustering of President Bush's judicial nominees -- a tactic many consider unconstitutional. One of those seven Republican lawmakers is Mike DeWine of Ohio.

Phil Burress is president of the Cincinnati-based Citizens for Community Values. Burress says DeWine betrayed values voters when he joined other Senate Republicans in the deal. But the CCV spokesman says he was not surprised at DeWine's decision.

"What he does right now could very well end up affecting the nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court and trying to get judges on the bench who will interpret the Constitution rather than rewrite it," Burress says. "And Mike DeWine is right in the camp of those who are opposed to and fighting against what we believe in."

According to Burress, this is not the first time the senior senator from Ohio has supported an "anti-family agenda."

"Here in Ohio, Mike DeWine has been drifting to left over the last few years -- and I think he's finally gotten to where he wanted to be," Burress states. "He was supportive of the homosexual agenda by supporting hate crimes, and last year everyone was totally shocked when he came out against us in our amendment to protect marriage between one man and one woman.

"And now he's on the wrong side of the judges," the CCV spokesman adds, "so those who thought Mike DeWine was pro-family and pro-life, they have another thing coming."

Burress says he plans to meet with other pro-family activists in Ohio to discuss the senator's future. "We're already getting calls ... and e-mails saying it's time to bring him home," he says. "I think everyone knows, and they should have known for a long time, that whether they have an R or a D behind their name means absolutely nothing anymore."

DeWine is up for re-election in 2006. In 1994 he became the first Republican senator to represent Ohio in more than two decades. Six years later, he became Ohio's first Republican senator to be re-elected in almost 50 years.