Fox News
reports that Leo Terrell, a prominent Los Angeles civil rights attorney and “Democratic champion of the left has resigned as a member of the NAACP, saying officials tried to strong-arm him into dropping his endorsement of a controversial Bush judicial nominee.” Terrell has supported Bush’s nomination of California judge Carolyn Kuhl to the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “I am proud to support Judge Kuhl,” Terrell wrote in a press release, adding that having argued civil rights cases in her courtroom, “she was fair and she applied the law.” Perhaps even more important than his Kuhl support is Terrell’s ringing endorsement of the NAACP after 13 years of voluntary legal services— “It turned out to be a really phony organization.”