Batfink's Beep -- 1-15-06

It only took them 5 years to figure it out

January 15, 2006

42 Senate Democrats held a meeting in April 2001, worried at the prospect of then-newly elected Bush reshaping the judiciary branch. This had, after all, been one of GWB's stated goals. So they got together in Farmington, PA to come up with a strategy to stop it. Invited guests were 'experts' like Laurence H. Tribe of Harvard Law School, Cass R. Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School and Marcia D. Greenberger, the co-president of the National Women's Law Center. What they came up with was the strategy we have seen played out at the Roberts, and now the Alito hearings. In few words, the plan was to not let superb credentials, which Bush was expected to insist on in his nominees, get in the way of their attacks. The prospect of a rightward shift in court composition in itself was determined by these heroes to be enough to torpedo a candidate.

It was understood by all present that this was new ground. It had always been the common understanding in judicial confirmation proceedings that the President would get his man (or woman), absent some sort of serious character flaw, like, say, a shown history of corruption; and nobody expected Bush to so fail in his screening process as to give the opposition that sort of opening. But it was all they had, now that Gore had failed to succeed Clinton, so they decided to go with it.

This would turn out to be a hard case to make, in no small part because of the superb choices GWB has made, but also, I think, because the public generally, just isn't as worried about good old traditional conservative jurisprudence as the Democrats and their hard left interest group masters are. In broad terms, one expects the courts to be the most conservative branch of government, being that it is their job to decide when written law has been observed, and when it has been transgressed. No sensible person wants to put the whole power of the law in the hands of one guy, subject only to the limits of his whim. We don't say 'sober as a judge' for nothing. We the people, through our elected representatives, decide what the law is. The role of the judge, in the end, is simply to read it, know it, and observe it. If we don't like what they decide based on it, we can change the law, but the judge is not himself the force of law, and cannot be allowed to be, least of all one who is appointed for life. So the notion of a judge who will enforce the law as written, just isn't all that scary to most people.

Not that they didn't make a spirited effort. Television ads are currently playing, purchased by liberal fringe groups, trying to claim that Alito is a danger to our liberties, claiming that he voted to 'allow the strip search of a 10 year old girl.' Never mind that she wasn't 'strip-searched', but merely patted down by a female agent, in case her drug dealer father had hidden his drugs on her person in case HE got searched. Even now, the Democrats are making a last ditch effort to delay the vote, to stall for time to let their smear ads work. But the Dems are said by the New York Times to be disheartened by their lack of success. Said Dale Bumpers, a former Democratic senator from Arkansas,

"You're trying to convince the American people that this man is not on your side. Obviously, we didn't do a very good job. Or I'd put it this way: Alito and Roberts did a good enough job that the Democrats couldn't make that case."

Indeed. The idea that a judge who understands that a drug dealer, faced with a search of his own person, might stash drugs on the persons of his wife and daughter, is a bad thing, is a tough sell to make, and when you're down to that, you're pretty well licked. And the Dems seem to have finally come to the conclusion that they had snake eyes all along. Asked what could be done to halt conservative gains made in the Judiciary Branch during the Bush era, not just on the SCOTUS, but also on the Federal Bench generally (where 60% of Federal appeals judges have now been appointed by Republicans), Stephanie Cutter, a senior Democratic Senate aide, sighed and responded: "Win."

Good that they finally figured it out.

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