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and to the law firms that pay for their political campaigns. Sam Kinch, Jr., a veteran Dallas Morning News reporter, recently wrote a book about the system entitled Crapshoot Justice: Politics, Money and the Texas Judiciary, and that pretty well sums it up. As we write, Owen is so far over the top of the Texas Supreme Court bench that she often can only agree to disagree. Before her colleagues reined her in, she was defining a jurisprudence so pro-business and pro-church it was unacceptable even in Texas. (Not only is she enamored of big bidness, she’s an evangelical Christian, never shy about rewriting abortion law from the bench.)

She’s forty-seven. Smart but not cerebral. A bit lazy. A fundamentalist Episcopalian (which is sort of a walking oxymoron). In short, the perfect Dubya Bush candidate for a lifetime appointment to the federal bench. Good as “Nino” Scalia. Maybe better. Scalia is at least partial to open government; Owen is responsible for the most restrictive open-records ruling imposed on Texans since Santa Anna seized the diaries of the defenders of the Alamo. Born in Palacios. Educated in Waco. Top score on the Texas Bar Exam. Good hair. Priscilla Owen is more Texas than the Dixie Chicks.

But do we want her on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals?

Did we miss something?

Was there a 2000 election mandate to remake the federal courts in the image of the Texas bench?

Hell no.

Hanging chads, absentee military votes, and intimidated African-American voters notwithstanding, the 2000 election was a mandate for centrism. If you take into account the Gore-Nader majority, we might have actually delivered a center-left mandate. Gore won the election. Gore and Nader swept it. Bush won by a plurality, then began to govern as if he had a mandate.

When it comes to judicial appointments, the Bush “mandate” is something we should all be watching. The federal judiciary is a BFD—a really big deal. A lot of progressive Democratic voters voted for Gore rather than Nader only because they feared Bush would win and pack the courts with right-wing ideologues.

Well, he won. And he’s packin’.

There’s a lot to pack. Eight of the thirteen circuit courts of appeal Bush inherited when he took the oath of office were already controlled by Republican judges. There were twenty-five vacant seats scattered around those thirteen appeals courts, in part because the Senate stonewalled many of the centrist judges Bill Clinton appointed while the R’s ran the show during his last four years in office. Bush political operative Karl Rove looked at those courts and saw the future. Just as he had in Texas. Packing courts with right-wing judges is one of Rove’s many talents.

Prissy Owen was Rove’s candidate from the git-go. She was a workaday commercial litigator at a Houston law firm when Rove made her candidacy, campaign, and election happen. His firm earned $250,000 from the big corporations and law firms (like Baker Botts) that paid for the campaign he ran for her. In four months he turned an unremarkable young lawyer into a dissenting Texas Supreme Court justice.

At the time Rove got Owen elected, every justice on the Texas Supreme Court had been a Karl Rove candidate, among them John Cornyn, whom Rove advanced from a San Antonio state district court to the high court to the office of state attorney general and then to the U.S. Senate. Kay Bailey Hutchison is another of Rove’s successful candidates, first for state treasurer and then for the U.S. Senate. In fact, all the statewide elected officials today in Texas were Karl’s candidates, with the exception of the lieutenant governor. Although Rove didn’t have a dog in that hunt, he chased one out of it. In an anyone-but-him campaign, a Rove surrogate (and candidate) bullied a principled Republican statesman out of the 2002 primary race for lieutenant governor.

If you like Texas government, you’ll love what this country will look like after two terms of GeeDubya Bush and the man Bush calls “Boy Genius”—or “Turdblossom” when Rove gets uppity. (“Wherever he goes, something is bound to pop up.