15 January 2006 Blog Home : January 2006 : Permalink
Democratic leaders say that President Bush is putting an enduring conservative ideological imprint on the nation's judiciary, and that they see little hope of holding off the tide without winning back control of the Senate or the White House.
Well Duh! Bush can nominate conservatives becauseIn interviews, Democrats said the lesson of the Alito hearings was that this White House could put on the bench almost any qualified candidate, even one whom Democrats consider to be ideologically out of step with the country.
That conclusion amounts to a repudiation of a central part of a strategy Senate Democrats settled on years ago in a private retreat where they discussed how to fight a Bush White House effort to recast the judiciary: to argue against otherwise qualified candidates by saying they would take the courts too far to the right.
Even though Democrats thought from the beginning that they had little hope of defeating the nomination, they were dismayed that a nominee with such clear conservative views - in particular a written record of opposition to abortion rights - appeared to be stirring little opposition.
Let me summarise this. "Bush nominates candidates that are emminently able for the role but don't have our policies. We think that when we tell this to the public they'll get upset but actually they mostly don't give a shit.""It may be a mistake to think that their failure demonstrates that they necessarily did something wrong," said Richard H. Fallon, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School. Referring to one of the major Democratic complaints about Judge Alito's testimony, Mr. Fallon said: "As long as most of the public will settle for evasive or uninformative answers, maybe there was nothing that they could have done to get Alito to make a major error."
You know if the Senate actually asked coherent questions it would help. I admit to not spending any time watching the CSPAN hearings - hey its not my country - but the edited "highlights" that I have watched make it clear that, as the Economist described it, this was "the Brainbox vs the Blowhards". If you want intelligent probing questions then you need intelligent probing senators. Going on the evidence, not just from this hearing BTW, I'd say that "intelligent, probing" is not a combination that applies to any US Senator. And then there is the shock that insulting the nominee enough to make his wife, who seems like an archtypical Mrs America, burst into tears is going to get more airplay than the rambling bloviating of any senator.Members of the committee, while defending their performance, said they had been hampered because many of the issues they needed to deal with - like theories of executive power - were arcane and did not lend themselves to building a public case against Judge Alito.
Mr. Kennedy said that the nomination process, and particularly the hearings, had "turned into a political campaign," and that the White House had proved increasingly skilled in turning that to its advantage.
"These issues are so sophisticated - half the Senate didn't know what the unitary presidency was, let alone the people of Boston," he said, referring to one of the legal theories that was a focus of the hearings. "I'm sure we could have done better."
Well it would really help if half the senate did understand "unitary presidency". Thanks to a couple of blogs I understand it enough to follow what points were mostly not maide by democratic senators. In fact what I read/saw was a smart but unassuming nominee show up his questioners as a bunch of clueless morons who didn't understand the questions they were asking. Fortunately no one will ever niminate me to be a judge because if I had to listen to these windbags phrases like "do you tie your own shoes?" would spring to mind if not ruder varients of the same."George Bush won the election," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, an Illinois Democrat. "If you don't like it, you better win elections."