Judicial nominee Michael Wallace has announced that he will ask President Bush on Tuesday to withdraw his nomination for appointment to the 5th Circuit.

Wallace is a highly intelligent lawyer, eminently qualified intellectually for the position. Unfortunately, he is a right-wing extremist who clearly lacks judicial temperament and who could not be expected to impartially rule on cases involving civil rights and similar fields of law about which he has never attempted to conceal his opinions and beliefs. Wallace was appointed by Reagan to head the Legal Services agency of the federal government with the intention that he would do his best to destroy the agency entrusted to him, a pattern Reagan and his Republican successors have followed many times since. He nearly succeeded. There is no reason to believe that he would behave any less ideologically as a federal appellate judge. The American Bar Association obviously felt the same way.

Extreme right-wing lawyers, wrong-headed as they may be, do not possess the ability to damage persons, institutions, and the law itself in the way a judge can. The American people have repudiated what Wallace stands for and we are all better off that he remains a very successful practicing lawyer.