Washington ? The Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines Thursday to kill the appeals court nomination of Judge Charles Pickering, handing President Bush a stinging defeat in a racially charged confirmation battle.

In a series of roll calls, the panel also snubbed Bush’s request to allow a vote in the full Senate on Pickering, a 64-year-old Mississippian with more than a decade on the bench.

U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering and his wife, Margaret Ann, leave the William M. Colmer Federal Building in Hattiesburg, Miss., after learning the Senate Judiciary Committee voted along party lines to kill Pickering's appeals court nomination. The panel voted on Thursday.

Pickering “deserves better than to be blocked by a party-line vote of 10 senators on one committee,” Bush said in a statement issued moments after the panel voted. “The voice of the entire Senate deserves to be heard.”

There was little suspense about the committee’s vote, but no shortage of emotion in the four-hour debate.

Pickering does not have “the temperament, the moderation or the commitment to core constitutional … protections that is required for a life- tenure position” on the appeals court, said Sen. Edward Kennedy, one of an unbroken string of committee Democrats to argue against confirmation.

Republicans were equally united in their support of Pickering. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, argued that Bush’s nominee had been victimized by a smear campaign by liberal interest groups seeking to impose “an ideological litmus test” on abortion, civil rights and other issues.

The committee’s actions left the nomination all but dead. The GOP leader, Sen. Trent Lott Pickering’s friend and Mississippi patron has authority to seek a vote by the full Senate, but such efforts are customarily settled on party-line votes.

One Democrat, Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, attacked the committee. “This action may very well elect a Republican governor in Mississippi,” he said, calling Pickering’s rejection an example of “the Terry-tail wagging the Democratic donkey.” That was a reference to Terry McAuliffe, the party’s chairman.

Much of the opposition to Pickering, 64, has come from civil rights groups, which say he supported segregation as a young man in Mississippi. Pickering’s opponents also point to his conservative voting record as a Mississippi state lawmaker and decisions as a judge.

Supporters, including some Mississippi Democrats and black leaders, cite numerous examples of support for civil rights as far back as the middle 1960s and note that Pickering won Senate confirmation in 1990 to be a U.S. District Court judge.

Forty of the 92 Bush judicial nominations have been confirmed by the Senate, most of them District Court judges. Seven of Bush’s 29 nominees to the U.S. Appeals Court, the regional courts one step below the Supreme Court, have been confirmed.