WASHINGTON -- The Senate voted yesterday to give California Supreme Court Justice Janice Rogers Brown a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Brown, who was approved with a vote of 56-43, was the second -- and among the most polarizing -- of President Bush's previously blocked nominees to the federal bench.

In the two years that she has awaited confirmation, she has faced blistering criticism from Democrats for her conservative judicial opinions and what her critics describe as a radical hostility toward the role of government in the lives of Americans.

Brown's confirmation was a victory for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., and other Republicans who have argued that every nominee should get an up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. Frist hailed Brown, who is 56, as a "superb judge" with "an unwavering commitment to judicial restraint and the rule of law."

Brown was one of 10 judges blocked by Democrats with parliamentary tactics last session. But when seven Democrats and seven Republicans struck a deal two weeks ago to avert a showdown that would have weakened the power of the minority party to block nominations, they cleared the way for Tuesday's 65-32 vote to limit debate on Brown -- a necessary step before she could be approved.

The Senate confirmed Brown yesterday along party lines with the exception of Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., who voted in favor of her confirmation.

Independent Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont was absent.

Sen Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., said Brown's confirmation vote was a "sad," because it showed that even moderate Republicans were willing to be a "rubber stamp" for the Bush administration.

"[Supreme Court Justice Antonin] Scalia looks like a moderate compared to Janice Rogers Brown," Schumer said.

During the debate over Brown's nomination, Democrats argued that Brown's placement on the D.C. Circuit Court, which deals with many key government issues, could be disastrous.

Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. said Brown "twists the law and does it routinely," and has more hostility toward government that any judge he has seen in his experience as a lawyer or as a member of the Senate.

"Janice Rogers Brown has repeatedly assailed protections for the elderly, for the environment, for victims of racial discrimination," Reid said.

Reid said her position on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, a court that Reid referred to as "the second most powerful in the land" because it oversees many of those matters, would empower her to "destroy those protections."

"Putting her in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is truly like putting the fox to guard the henhouse," Reid said.

But Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., argued that even if some of Brown's statements have been undiplomatic, free speech and free thinking are important aspects of the judiciary.

"If you have a nominee who exercises some independence and individuality in her speeches ... but has solid opinions and solid work in state government, that is the test as to whether she ought to be confirmed," said Specter, who voted for Brown's confirmation along with Pennsylvania's other Republican senator, Rick Santorum.

"If it weren't party payback time," Specter said referring to Democratic complaints that the GOP had blocked many of President Clinton's judicial nominees, "this ferocious debate would not be undertaken."

President Bush nominated Brown to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in July of 2003. She was rated as "qualified" by the American Bar Association, the middle rating that the organization uses to describe nominees. But a minority of the panel rated her as "not qualified."

Brown has served on the California Supreme Court since May of 1996 when she became the first African American woman to serve on that bench. For the two previous years, she had served on an appellate California court.

Before becoming a judge, Brown had an extensive career in public service. She served as a deputy attorney general in California for eight years beginning in 1979. She spent three years as general counsel and a deputy secretary at California's Business, Transportation and Housing Agency.

Between 1991 and 1994, she worked as the legal affairs secretary for then-Gov. Pete Wilson.

Republican supporters, including Frist, yesterday heralded Brown's personal journey as "an inspiring story of the American dream."

As the daughter of sharecroppers in Alabama, she went to segregated schools during the era of Jim Crow laws. Her father later joined the Air Force and the family moved to California. She graduated from California State University, Sacramento, and then received her law degree in 1977 from the University of California, Los Angeles.

But over the past two years, Brown has become one of the most fiercely contested of Bush's appointees to the federal bench.

Liberal groups banded together to buy television advertisements in which they asked constituents to call their senators and urge them to vote against Brown.

Democrats have given scores of speeches picking apart her opinions and speeches, arguing that she is far out of even the conservative mainstream.

They have often cited her comments in a speech to members of the Federalist Society in 2000, in which she criticized the New Deal and said "big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate -- the drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens."

Also in that speech, Brown said, "Where government moves in, community retreats, civil society disintegrates, and our ability to control our own destiny atrophies. The result is: families under siege; war in the streets; unapologetic expropriation of property; the precipitous decline of the rule of law; the rapid rise of corruption; the loss of civility and the triumph of deceit. The result is a debased, debauched culture which finds moral depravity entertaining and virtue contemptible."

Democrats have also tried to highlight her role as a lone dissenter in numerous cases on the California Supreme Court.

But in her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in October 2003, Brown defended her record and her past statements.

"I absolutely understand the difference in roles in being a speaker and being a judge," Brown said, after Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, asked her whether she was committed to following the law and not injecting her personal opinions into her judicial opinions.

Asked about the accusation that she was a judicial activist, Brown responded that senators could find "many, many decisions in which I have deferred to the legislature or argued for separation of powers or for restraint in the judicial role."

Though some of Brown's supporters have suggested that opposition to her appointment is racially motivated, the National Bar Association, an African American organization; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congressional Black Caucus -- along with the D.C. Democratic Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton -- urged the Senate to reject her appointment.

The Senate also agreed to end debate on the nomination another previously blocked appellate court nominee yesterday. The Senate voted 67-32 to proceed to a vote today on the nomination of William H. Pryor Jr. to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Bush gave Pryor, the former Alabama attorney general, an interim appointment to the court after he was blocked by Democrats last session.