Pete Sessions: “I ask the question: How did a wonderful person and a wonderful nominee, such as Judge Janice Rogers Brown, become so…”

“I ask the question: How did a wonderful person and a wonderful nominee, such as Judge Janice Rogers Brown, become so controversial? What is it that is going on here? She served 8 years on the California Supreme Court. She has served on the Third Appellate District Court of Appeals of California. Every member of that court of appeals with whom she has served has written in support of her nomination. She was reelected to the California Supreme Court with 76 percent of the vote. I think there were four other judges on the ballot. She had the highest vote of any of those judges. California is certainly not a right-wing State. She grew up in my home State of Alabama, not too far away from my hometown in a small town area of Greenville, AL. She is the daughter of a sharecropper. A sharecropper is a person who does not own land but farms a part of somebody else's property. He pays the landowner with some of the produce and keeps a little of the produce for himself and his family. That is how she grew up. Somehow, as a teenager, she moved off to California, worked her way through college and then law school. She then worked for the attorney general's office of the State of California in which she represented the State on appeals of criminal cases. She wrote the briefs, she argued the legal questions, she participated in the trials of criminal cases, but I think most of her time was spent writing the appellate briefs to the court of appeals.…”