January 10, 2003
AND WE ALL KNOW WHAT PAYBACKS ARE:
Payback in Judges (E. J. Dionne Jr., January 10, 2003, washingtonpost.com)You have to hand it to President Bush and his judge-pickers.They understand the power of the judiciary to shape American political life for years to come. They brazenly use their executive authority to fill the courts with their allies. Then they attack, attack and attack again when opposition senators dare invoke their own constitutional power to slow a juggernaut whose purpose is to remake the world according to the specifications of Justice Antonin Scalia.
To make clear who is in charge, Bush took two circuit court nominees rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee last year, when it was in Democratic hands, and sent them right back. [...]
Politically, the renominations were shrewd. By sending Pickering up again, Bush signaled to his Southern backers that he was willing to stand up for a Mississippian against Senate liberals, despite Lott's defenestration. And the energy the Pickering and Owen battles will soak up may allow other ideological nominees to slip through.
The real issue here involves not the personal characteristics of nominees -- there are plenty of smart conservatives on Bush's list -- but a political
struggle to create an increasingly activist conservative bench. "They realized that if they took over the one unelected part of the government, they could govern for a generation," says Sen. Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat.A liberal fantasy? On the contrary, the ever-candid Clint Bolick, a former Reagan Justice Department official and conservative activist, told The Post this week that "everyone on the right agreed in 2000 that judicial nominations were the single most important reason to be for Bush." The worst-kept secret in Washington: Judicial appointments are the tribute Bush pays to his political base.
Is it possible to "brazenly" exercise a power that's explicitly delegated to you by the Constitution? President Bush is a conservative Republican. The House and Senate are at least Republican and mostly conservative. We're in for a few years of conservative judges being put on the bench. And?
After all, it's not as if Mr. Bush has proposed doing violence to the Constitution and packing the Court, the way FDR tried to do.
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 10, 2003 11:44 PMAs a fairly strict constructionist, I just wish
that some of the conservative jurists that
made the liberals quake 30 years ago (Rehnquist)
had actually been conservative.
Somebody please tell me how any court --
liberal or conservative -- could uphold the
abortion clinic protest law, for example.
As long as abortion's legal you have to let them into the building.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2003 4:43 AMSo... There is something imporper about a conservative president nominating conservitive jugdes?
Or is it that a majority-conservative congress must not approve thos picks?
I find it revealing that these 'ultra-conservatives' that people are screaming about fail to trigger filibuster inscincts in all but the most fanatical democratic senators.
They have enough to keep a filibuster going. If Bush's actions are so unreasonable, they should unite the opposition.
But they don't. Because they aren't unreasonable, newspaper rhetoric aside.
OJ: It's a bit more complicated than that. That's why Kennedy dissented from that case (and he co-wrote Casey).
And my question is: Was Clinton "brazen" when he put Ruthie Ginsburg and Stevie Breyer on? They are, without Scalia's brains, his ideological opposites on the Court.
Its become perfectly clear to me over the years that when the left says "democracy" they don't mean what I think the word means.
Posted by: David Cohen at January 11, 2003 12:13 PMSafe bet, since they even define "is" differently.
Posted by: oj at January 11, 2003 2:02 PMSchumer is such a whiny two-faced bastard. If it was perfectly ok for him and his cronies (led by Leaky Leahy) to refuse to vote for nominees for partisan reasons, why is it not okay for Bush to appoint them for the same reasons?
I guess being a Democrat means you get to make as many rules as you want but you're never obligated to follow them yourself. I hope Rudy puts this weasel out of our misery.