OVER THE PAST two months there has been a series of savage right-wing attacks on a prospective nominee to be a federal judge, Peter Edelman. It has the look of an organized campaign, and a curious one: an attempt not to contest the choice in the Senate but to scare President Clinton out of making the nomination.
I have known Mr. Edelman for years. Ordinarily that would keep me from writing on the subject. But the attackers describe a Peter Edelman so unlike the real person that I think comment is appropriate -- with due notice of my connection.
The lawyer I know is a man of reason, a consensus-builder widely liked and respected. He worked in the Justice Department and, during Robert Kennedy's years in the Senate, as his legislative assistant. Since 1982 he has been a law professor at Georgetown University. On leave now, he is counselor to the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
His wife, Marian Wright Edelman, is president of the Children's Defense Fund, on whose board Hillary Rodham Clinton served. The Clintons and Edelmans are friends, a fact that may have something to do with the present hostility.
For some time Mr. Edelman has been on the Justice Department's lists of possible judicial nominees. Last September, President Clinton selected him for a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Mr. Edelman was told that the nomination would be formally sent to the Senate some time after the new Congress convened in January.
Then came the attacks, notably in the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal and in a column by George Will. They painted Mr. Edelman as soft on crime and contemptuous of democracy: notions that I believe a few minutes of conversation with him would lead any reasonable person to dismiss.
The most intense criticism has been of an article Mr. Edelman wrote for the Hastings Law Journal in 1987. It suggests that a basis can be found in the Constitution for a right to a minimum income: enough to stave off desperate poverty.
The article notes that some conservative legal scholars want to go back to the long-abandoned arguments that government economic regulation is unconstitutional. It can be better argued, the article says, that the Constitution assures a measure of economic protection for citizens.
I entirely disagree with that argument. Locating affirmative economic rights in a constitution -- ours or any other country's -- will only weaken negative rights: the protections against official abuse that are found in the Bill of Rights.
But to lay out such an argument as a theory is hardly shocking, or proof of how one would act in the constraining role of a judge. Moreover, Mr. Edelman's Hastings article plainly saw the idea of bTC going to court as a way of dramatizing the issue of poverty in this country. He said the judicial relief he described was "not desirable. The better response to poverty is legislative."
The vicious character of the campaign against Mr. Edelman is made clear by the charge that he is soft on crime. A Wall Street Journal editorial said: "As director of New York State's Division for Youth in 1978, Mr. Edelman ordered a one-week furlough for a 17-year-old who had knifed a girl during a robbery. While on his furlough, this juvenile Willie Horton was arrested for raping, robbing and trying to electrocute a 63-year-old woman." That charge is completely false. Mr. Edelman had nothing to do with furloughing the 17-year-old. When a judge told him the youth was dangerous, he ordered a bar on any home visits -- but one had already been approved by the director of the facility where he was.
The truth was described in a letter to the Journal by J. Thomas Mullen, president of Catholic Charities in Cleveland, who was Mr. Edelman's deputy in New York. The state's former governor, Hugh Carey, wrote to say that Mr. Edelman had been an outstanding youth director and had made many wise changes, including "far stricter supervision for violent offenders."
The incoming chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, would no doubt prefer not to handle controversial nominations. But he is a fair-minded man, and he surely will think it fairer for the committee to examine Mr. Edelman's views than to have him stopped on the way by a political mugging.
Anthony Lewis is a columnist for the New York Times.