What if Priscilla Owen were a man?

Why aren’t Democrats swooning over Priscilla Owens?

Rich Lowry of National Review poses that question, noting:

“Priscilla Owen, 50, is one of the more talented women of her generation. She finished third in her class at Baylor Law School. She had the best score in the state on the Texas bar exam when she took it in 1977. Her performance as a judge on the Texas supreme court has earned her the highest rating from the American Bar Association. It’s the sort of career that liberals promoting the advancement of women should swoon over. But Senate Democrats are blocking her nomination to a federal appeals court, not just because she is supposedly too conservative, but because she is too female.”

Come again?

“If the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission were reviewing the Democrats’ filibuster choices, it would have grounds for a disparate-impact lawsuit. The over-representation of minorities and women — especially if you put aside nominees from Michigan who have been targeted in a spat dating back to the Clinton years — is not a coincidence. Democrats fear that a non-Protestant, nonwhite non-male might be easier for President Bush to elevate to the Supreme Court from a federal appeals court, so they want to keep nominees with the ’wrong’ demographics from getting on an appeals court in the first place. Consider Miguel Estrada, or as some Democrats think of him, ‘the dangerous Latino.’

“A Democratic Senate aide wrote in 2001 that liberal groups were especially keen to block Estrada. They consider him, the aide wrote, ’especially dangerous because he had a minimal paper trail, he is Latino, and the White House seems to be grooming him for a Supreme Court appointment.’ Peter Beinart, editor of the liberal New Republic, agreed that it was important to block the ’Honduran immigrant’ for the same reason. Estrada withdrew his nomination in 2003.

“This doesn’t make Democrats racist, sexist, or any other -ist. And they are correct in their political reasoning. Republicans have played demographic politics to help get conservatives on the Supreme Court, namely Antonin Scalia (Italian American) and Clarence Thomas (African American). But that doesn’t make the Dems’ racial and sex-based profiling any less awkward. In the filibuster fight, Democrats invoke minority rights. What they are attempting to vindicate is the right of the Senate minority to block minorities.”