The occasion was the Senate confirmation hearing the other day for Priscilla Owen, a state Supreme Court justice from Texas nominated by the Bush administration for an opening on the U.S. Court of Appeals.

But before getting to the matter at hand, Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., felt compelled to offer a history lesson and set a combative tone.

The appellate seat in question had been vacant since January 1997, Leahy said, largely as a result of what the Republicans had done back in the day when they ran the Senate and a Democrat was president.

Bill Clinton had tried twice to fill the seat, both times with Hispanic lawyers from Texas. Neither got so much as a hearing from the Judiciary Committee. Jorge Rangel withdrew his candidacy after 15 months, seeing that he had no chance. Enrique Moreno was in limbo for a year and a half before President Bush pulled the plug.

Leahy’s drift was clear: The Republicans should stop whining about the liberals’ opposition to Priscilla Owen and how politicized the confirmation process has become. They should be thrilled that she was being given a hearing. They should be grateful that the Democrats now in charge were being marginally more responsible than the GOP had been during Clinton’s second term.

Owen’s nomination, which is 14 months old itself, has produced the second big judicial confirmation fight of the Bush era after Charles Pickering and it’s not hard to see why.

Conservatives view Owen as a qualified and experienced jurist. She’s a former corporate litigator who’s received the highest rating from the American Bar Assn. and is known for her work in providing legal services for the poor.

To liberals, though, she’s a right-wing ideologue who, when running for the high court in her home state, accepted contributions from Enron executives. As a judge, they say, she’s invariably stood up for big business and against the little guy.

For all of that, there probably wouldn’t be much controversy surrounding her candidacy to serve the 5th Circuit (Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana) were it not for abortion.

Two years ago, the state legislature in Texas passed a law requiring any girl under the age of 18 to notify a parent before receiving an abortion.

The law includes a “judicial bypass” listing the circumstances under which the girl may dispense with notification. To qualify, she must prove to a judge that she’s mature enough to make the decision on her own, that telling a parent is not in her own best interests, or that notification might expose her to mental or physical abuse.

Owen has been decidedly unsympathetic to the few girls whose bypass cases have reached the Texas Supreme Court. Her dissent in the first such case, when the court was trying to determine how to deal with the law, has generated much of the furor.

In that opinion, she appeared to go out of her way to try to make the bypass provision tougher than the legislature intended. She says she based her conclusions on several U.S. Supreme Court cases, including the 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey that upheld parts of the Pennsylvania abortion law.

But those cases don’t seem relevant in the context of the Texas law. They lay out how far states can go in restricting abortions, and Texas didn’t go that far. Under questioning from the senators, Owen did pledge that she would abide by and enforce all of the Supreme Court’s decisions on abortion.

Priscilla Owen is not my idea of the perfect federal judge, but that isn’t the question. She’s quite conservative and probably pro-life, but we have a conservative, pro-life president.

What I do know is that she has solid credentials and that the partisan warfare over the federal judiciary has to de-escalate at some point. I think we’ve reached that point.

The Democrats on the committee would be well advised to hold their fire and hoard their credibility for Bush’s first Supreme Court appointment. They might find themselves in need of both then.

Larry Eichel is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. His e-mail address is leichel@phillynews.com.