Pickering, not a good choice.
He has been reversed by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals (the one on which Bush wants to place him) 26 times, 15 of them for violating "well-settled principles of law"--an embarrassing rebuke in which the higher court finds the answer so obvious it doesn't even bother to publish its opinion. (By contrast, the last judge Bush named to the Fifth Circuit, Edith Brown Clement, had not one such reversal.) No, Pickering is not a racist. But he is a judicial activist who disregards both the letter and intent of the law when he doesn't agree with it.