Continued from page 7
Court, by the end of October. Fifty-three are white, three
are Asian American, one is Hispanic, and one is African
American. There are 47 men and 11 women. Thirteen
have won senate approval.
The numbers stand in marked contrast to those of
Obama, who made diversifying the federal bench a
priority. White men represented just 37 percent of judges
confirmed during Obama’s two terms; nearly 42 percent of
his judges were women.
Some of Obama’s efforts were thwarted by a
Republican-led senate that blocked all the nominations he
made in the final year of his presidency, handing Trump a
backlog of more than 100 open seats and significant sway
over the future of the court.
Trump has moved aggressively to name new judges,
getting off to a much quicker start than his predecessors.
He has nominated more than twice as many as Obama
had at this point in his presidency. While there have been
clashes in the senate over the nomination process,
Republican majority leader Mitch McConnell has
signalled that he is committed to moving judicial
nominees through.
Many of Trump’s white, male nominees would replace
white, male judges. But of the Trump nominees currently
pending, more than a quarter are white males slated for
seats have been held by women or minorities.
Of the eight seats currently vacant that had non-white
judges, only one has a non-white nominee.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley says Trump is
focused on qualifications and suggests that prioritizing
diversity would bring politics to the bench.
“The president has delivered on his promise to
nominate the best, most-qualified judges,” Gidley said.
“While past presidents may have chosen to nominate
activist judges with a political agenda and a history of
legislating from the bench, President Trump has
nominated outstanding originalist judges who respect the
U.S. Constitution.”
Trump, who has cited the confirmation of Supreme
Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as a key achievement, has
focused on judges with conservative résumés. His picks
have been welcomed by conservative legal groups.
Leonard Leo, the executive vice president of the
Federalist Society who has advised Trump on judges, said
the president’s judicial picks should be evaluated based on
his nominations to the Supreme Court and appellate
courts, given that home-state senators traditionally offer
recommendations for district courts that carry significant
weight when the lawmaker and the president are of the
same party.
There have been 19 nominees to those higher courts;
more than two-thirds are white men.
And past presidents also have pushed for diversity at
the district courts. The Obama White House would make
clear that diversity was a priority and “if we found good
candidates, we would encourage senators to take a look at
them,” said Christopher Kang, who worked on judicial
nominations in the Obama administration.
Alberto Gonzales, who served as attorney general for
George W. Bush, said that when considering nominees
“sometimes President Bush would look at the list we gave
him and he would say, ‘I want more diversity, I want more
women, I want more minorities.’”
In his first year, Obama’s confirmed judicial nominees
were 31 percent white men. Bush had 67 percent, Bill
Clinton 38 percent, George H.W. Bush 74 percent, and
Reagan 93 percent.
For its analysis, The Associated Press looked at all
lifetime appointments to federal judgeships — including
all seats on the Supreme Court, Courts of Appeals, U.S.
District Courts, and International Courts of Trade —
counting nominations to higher courts as new
appointments. For the biographical information of each
judge, The AP used data from the Federal Judicial Center.
In the case of pending Trump nominees, reporters
called each nominee or their representative to collect
information on race, gender, and birthdate. In eight cases
where nominees declined to give their race, officials
familiar with the information confirmed that all identified
themselves as white males.
The staff at
The Asian Reporter
wish you and your
family a happy and
safe Thanksgiving!
THE ASIAN REPORTER n Page 11
Rare art from China’s 19th-century
woman ruler comes to the U.S.
By John Rogers
The Associated Press
ANTA ANA, Calif. — For more
than a century she has been
known as the woman behind
the throne, the empress who through
skill and circumstance rose from
lowly imperial consort to iron-fisted
ruler of China at a time and in a place
when women were believed to have
no power at all.
But it turns out Empress Dowager
Cixi was much more than that. The
19th-century ruler, who consolidated
authority
through
political
maneuvering that at times included
incarceration and assassination, was
also a serious arts patron and even an
artist herself, with discerning tastes
that helped set the style for tradi-
tional Asian art for more than a
century.
That side of Cixi comes to the
western world for the first time with
the unveiling of “Empress Dowager,
Cixi: Selections From the Summer
Palace” at the Bowers Museum in
Santa Ana. The wide-ranging
collection, never before seen outside
China, will remain at the Southern
California museum through March
11 before returning to Beijing.
Consisting of more than 100 pieces
from the lavish Beijing palace Cixi
called home during the final years of
her life, “Empress Dowager” includes
numerous examples of intricately
designed
Chinese
furniture,
porcelain vases, and stone carvings,
as well as several pieces of western
art, rare in China at the time, that
she also collected. Among them are a
large oil-on-canvas portrait of herself
she commissioned the prominent
Dutch artist Hubert Vos to create.
Other western accoutrements
include gifts from visiting digni-
taries, among them British silver
serving sets, German and Swiss
clocks, a marble-topped table from
Italy with inlaid stones in the shape
of a chessboard, and even an
American-built luxury automobile.
The latter, a 1901 Duryea touring car,
is believed to be the first automobile
imported into China and as such may
have involved the empress in the
country’s first automobile accident
when her driver is said to have hit a
pedestrian.
“We already have a lot of
scholarship on who she is and how
she ruled China. But this show brings
you a different angle,” said exhibit
curator Ying-Chen Peng, as she led a
recent pre-opening tour of it through
the museum that was kicked off by a
raucous performance of Chinese lion
dancers accompanied by musicians
loudly banging gongs, cymbals, and
drums.
“This exhibition seeks to introduce
you to this woman as an arts patron,
as an architect, as a designer,” the
American University art historian
said.
That’s an approach that may
S
Photo courtesy of the Bowers Museum
Trump choosing white men as
judges, highest rate in decades
Arts Culture & Entertainment
AP Photo/Tim Bradbury, Pool
November 20, 2017
TRENDSETTING EMPRESS. A 1901 Duryea Surrey (top photo) and a reception throne set
(bottom photo) are shown during the unveiling of the “Empress Dowager, Cixi: Selections From the
Summer Palace” exhibit at Orange County’s Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, California. The exhibit
focuses on Cixi, the mysterious woman who quietly ruled China with an iron fist for 43 years, from
the mid-1800s until her death in 1908.
finally have gotten it to the western have made it by wielding a large
world. Anne Shih, who chairs the heavy brush while standing on a stool
museum’s board of directors, noted as some of the eunuchs who served
recently that she spent 10 years her stretched out the paper.
Not far away are ink-and-paper
trying to persuade the Chinese
drawings of flowers the empress also
government to lend Cixi’s art.
The Bowers has built an impres- created, although Peng notes with a
sive international reputation over the laugh that when it came to painting,
years by hosting exhibitions of Cixi was a much better calligrapher.
Placed into the emperor’s harem as
priceless, historical, often larger-
than-life artworks from Tibet, the a low-level teenage consort, she
Silk Road, the tomb of China’s first quickly elevated her status by giving
birth to his only son in 1856. When
emperor, and other historic sites.
However, Shih says the Chinese the emperor died six years later she
government initially turned her installed the boy as his successor and,
down repeatedly. Officials told her as the woman behind the throne,
the empress, who outlived two much ousted opponents, brought in
younger emperors, including one who loyalists, and ran the country herself
died mysteriously of arsenic poison- for the next 43 years. She died in 1908
ing, was just too controversial. She’s at age 72.
Although she led her country
been portrayed in numerous films
and books and not always positively. through numerous wars launched by
Shih finally prevailed, however, foreign invaders during those years,
when she emphasized this show she also found time to visit with
dignitaries from other countries and
would focus on art, not politics.
Although it does, it still becomes pursue her own passion for art.
Her real artistic skill, however, lay
apparent to visitors what a
formidable presence Cixi must have not in making art but in envisioning
been as they enter a re-creation of her works that would stand the critical
throne room to be greeted by a test of time and then finding skilled
larger-than-life portrait of her artisans to create them.
“Her personal preference actually
covered in jewels and razor-sharp
fingernail protectors as she glares led to the further development of
these very ornate designs,” Peng said,
ominously at her audience.
Nearby, however, are objects that observing some of the intricately
quickly make her passion for art carved, gold-inlaid furniture and
porcelain
objects.
clear. Prominent among them is a hand-painted
towering calligraphy work of black “Nowadays when you go to antique
ink embossed on a sheet of paper that, shops, you can see quite a few pieces
stretching to about six feet, is taller in this style. You can say she was a
than the dowager was. She is said to trendsetter.”