Races of the week: Pickering vs. Shows

Mississippi's 3rd U.S. House District

Throughout the early part of 2002, high drama worthy of a novel by the late Allen Drury swirled around Rep. Chip Pickering (R.-Miss.) and his father, U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering.

President Bush had named the elder Pickering to the U.S. Circuit Courtof Appeals, sparking an onslaught by Democratic senators, the likes of which had not been seen since Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court 13 years before. Charges-- many of them blatantly false-Were flung at Judge Pickering, among them that he had been a supporter of segregationist candidates for office in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In truth, like many of the Republicans who were the badly outnumbered political minority in the Magnolia State in those days, Pickering fought the Ku Klux Klan and the "segs" who were dominant in the all-powerful Democratic Party of the era. Nine past presidents of the state Bar Association and a former head of the state NAACP would strongly weigh in for the embattled nominee.

But it was to no avail. Democrats had the majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee and Pickering went down on a party-line vote. Given the doomed nominee's actual background as a friend of civil rights when it wasn't popular, more than a few of his supporters suspected that the opposition was less concerned about any racial issues than the fact that Charles Pickering had always been a conservative, that as a member of the Platform Committee at the 1976 Republican National Convention he played a pivotal role in writing the first human life plank in the party manifesto.

At the same time, the younger Pickering had been facing an onslaught of his own since February, as a band of House Democrats challenged a federal court redistricting plan placing the three-term Republican congressman in the same Jackson-based district as Democratic Rep. Ronnie Shows.

Led by far-left Democratic Rep. John Conyers (Mich.), a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, the eight House members charged that "a panel of three Republican-appointed federal judges" was able to draw another plan weakening black voting strength in the proposed new district only because the Bush Justice Department raised last-minute questions about a redistricting plan crafted in state court. (Translation: The plan drawn up by state judges was more favorable to Democrat Shows than that drawn by the federal judges.)

The weeks-long legal odyssey of just what the newly merged district in Mississippi should look like ended -in the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in favor of the plan written by the federal judges.

So Chip Pickering (lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 95%) must square off against Ronnie Shows (lifetime ACU rating: 52%) in a district 62% of which comes from the Republican congressman's former turf and 38% from the Democratic congressman's. Had the present district existed two years ago, it would have cast nearly two-thirds of its votes for George W. Bush.

So the 38-year-old Pickering is a cinch for re-election? Not on your life.

When one is pursued, as vigorously through the court system as were Pickering and his supporters in defending the federal redistricting plan, there is little-if any-- doubt that Conyers and fellow national Democrats will be out raising money and drumming up support for his opponent, trying to win at 'the ballot box what they failed to win in the courtroom. In addition, Shows is a sitting member of Congress, with all the resources at his disposal that Pickering has.

And, of course, pundits and pols inevitably refer to Shows as a "conservative Democrat"-just the kind of candidate political action committees are attracted to as an avenue of saying: "Hey, look, We're not partisan. We back some Democrats."

"Well, I am a conservative and I'm sure different from my opponent," Pickering observed dryly. "I won't vote for Dick Gephardt for speaker and I don't have 60% of my campaign donations coming from labor unions and the American Trial Lawyers Association. He does."

"I voted to make President Bush's tax cut permanent. He voted against it. I am a consistent supporter of school vouchers. He voted against [House Majority Leader] Dick Armey's bill to provide scholarships to students at low-performing schools and give them a choice of private schools. I tried to stop what I strongly consider unconstitutional campaign finance reform in the House. He voted for the full package."

Ronnie Shows can call himself whatever-he chooses, but his record speaks for itself, as do his supporters. The obvious-- in fact, the only-choice for conservatives in Mississippi's 3rd District this year is Chip Pickering.

(Pickering for Congress, 415 Yazoo St., Jackson, Miss. 39201; 601-948-2447)

Copyright Human Events Publishing, Inc. Jul 22, 2002
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