(AgapePress) - Conservatives are expressing outrage over the Democrats' latest rejection of a Bush nominee for the federal courts. Yesterday, the Democrat-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee voted down Priscilla Owen of Texas.

Along party lines, the Committee voted Thursday to refuse to allow Texas Justice Priscilla Owen's nomination to be voted on by the full Senate. Representatives of many conservative pro-family groups are up in arms over the fact she was "Pickering-ed" -- in reference to Mississippi Judge Charles Pickering, another pro-life nominee who met the same fate before Senator Patrick Leahy's committee.

Ken Connor, president of the Family Research Council, says Owens has been "sacrificed on the altar of political correctness."

"Her defeat exposes their [committee Democrats] absolute commitment to radical feminist organizations, which smeared her reputation for supporting a Texas law that requires young girls to notify their parents before having an abortion," Connor says.

He points out that one of those feminist groups, the National Organization for Women, is pushing for women to be allowed into the August National Golf Club while at the same time blocking Owen's nomination. "If they were really for women achieving higher status in their careers, they wouldn't have contributed to Judge Owen's defeat," Connor says.

Tom Jipping of Concerned Women for America has been monitoring the judicial nomination process for nearly two decades. That process, he says, is in a "partisan meltdown."

"The rejection of Priscilla Owen is the first time in American history that someone who has been unanimously rated 'well qualified' by the American Bar Association was nonetheless rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee," he says. "This is being done totally for partisan and ideological purposes without any regard for qualifications or anything resembling an accurate reading of someone's record."

Jipping says the Judiciary Committee has become a tool of abortion extremists bent on keeping pro-life judges of the federal bench. "No matter what Justice Owen said at her hearing, no matter what her cases and her opinions actually say, no matter what she says in response to written questions, Democratic senators are doing exactly what the abortion extremists are telling them to do," he says. "The truth has nothing to do with it."

Jipping called the Owen vote the greatest injustice he has witnessed in the nomination process.

In the aftermath of the Owen vote, John Nowacki of the Judicial Selection Monitoring Project believes President Bush needs to do more to help his nominees.

"I think the White House did understand after the [Charles] Pickering nomination that it does need to be more active in this issue, and that they can't rely on the Democrats to treat nominees fairly," he says. "[The White House has] been more engaged in the Priscilla Owen nomination, but I certainly think the president ought to be out there in more than just campaign stops talking about how his judicial nominees are being treated and what he expects from the Senate in the way of fairness."

Nowacki believes things will pick up as the pressure to end the shortage of federal judges continues to mount on Committee chairman Patrick Leahy.

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