State Representatives Liston Shows, Soso, R. H. Donald, Quitman, and Senator Charles Pickering, are very interested in this matter and requested to be advised of developments in connection with SCEF infiltration of GPA and full background of James Simmons."

That's from page 3 of this document, a January 5, 1972, letter from the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission. Emphasis is mine. Senator Charles Pickering, needless to say, is now a Bush judicial nominee.

Joe Conason explains the document:

When George H.W. Bush first named him to the federal bench in 1990 (two years after he chaired the Bush-Quayle campaign in Mississippi), Pickering told the Senate that he'd had no contact with the State Sovereignty Commission, his home state's notorious anti-black secret police apparatus.

"I never had any contact with that agency," he testified. Not quite true, as the since-unsealed records of the Sovereignty Commission reveal. Actually, in January 1972, Pickering apparently asked [see last page of memo] a Commission employee to keep him apprised of its surveillance of an integrated union-organizing campaign among pulpwood workers in his hometown. Later, Pickering claimed that he had been worried about "Klan" infiltration of the pulpwood workers union, but the Commission documents show clearly that it was investigating left-wing integrationists, not the KKK.

Conason also discusses the deep involvement of Pickering's then-law partner, Carroll Gartin, in the Sovereignty Commission.

And Atrios has more information on the Sovereignty Commission.

This is what you won't learn from the carefully calibrated GOP spin machine as this nomination battle plays out.

Party of Lincoln?