Oct 31 2005
Miers Fall Out
DJ Drummond has a really good post out about the Miers debacle and why naive calls to simply move on are probably doing more damage than the intended result. I will predict the support for Alito will be very tepid and not inspire the base or the public. I don’t know Alito at all, and since I now have little to no trust in the sites where I used to get information on nominees (Redstate, NRO’s Bench Memos, Confirm Them) I have no choice to basically sit this out until the hearings.
I will not base my opinion on information provided by people who jump to conclusions from a fear of the unknown. I do not care what their political leanings are. I will not use information from those who feel demeaning someone personally is a form of political debate. I prefer more reliable and reasoned sources.
The rightwing will have to push this one all on their own. They destroyed my confidence in them as leaders, so now I am not a follower. Besides, adding another man to the court is a really, really bad move. The GOP will never convince women to support them if they cannot find one qualified woman to fill O’Connor’s seat. But then again, after the callous and immature way Miers was treated, I am sure all the qualified women said no thanks.
As a lot of women will be. There is no need to push the Miers debacle under the rug and pretend the ugliness never happened. It happened. And it is in the hands of the right wing anti-Mier’s crowd to fix it.
Harriet Who?
And like that, the Bush Administration got its mojo back. The President nominated Samuel A. Alito, Jr., who’s a well regarded Appellate Court judge from the Third Circuit. He’s well known in conservative circles and has a record to pore over (and I h…
Amen, AJ. Alito may sound good to most conservatives, but I need to be shown exactly why this guy is so wonderful.
Yep, now people need to show me why this guy is so good. And I have so few peoplenow that I still have confidence in they are not rabid zealots.
Trick or Treat! “Happy Alitoween†As Rush said today: “Quit Wandering off the Reservation†Five Reasons to like Scalito!
1. Lady Harriet was craving Italian and wanted something spicy.
2. New Menu for WH Wed Night Special: Spaghetti & Meatballs!
3. The MSM & Chuckie are against her and Harry is spitting up feathers!
4. Alito & Tony Soporano were Grand Marshals for a parade in Trenton, NJ!
5. Sam and Arlen are old pals and go way back in Phily!
“I think miracles exist in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see.†Peggy Noonan
Agreed. I just don’t trust the Beltway-conservative establishment any more.
Hedgehog Central reports that this was doneby a very vocal minority – a Beltway establishment.
http://hedgehogcentral.blogspot.com/2005/10/as-we-move-forward-on-scotus-nominees.html
It speaks volumes. There are more of us then there were of them. That’s something we needed to take advantage of.
I’m not done with the GOP, but I am mostly done with the Beltway conservative establishment.
Hi HH:
Welcome, great to see you posting here. I saw where you got cross ways with Thomas at Redstate. Hope you hang around here more often since you and I do share the same opinions as AJ about the conservative establishment.
They all said they wanted the big fight …
Now let’s see if they have what it takes to pull one off.
Time for some high-energy BRINKSMANSHIP folks!!!!!!!! Yearrggggggghhhhhh, let’s PUSH THAT NUCLEAR OPTION!!! Let’s test the committment of the mighty middle, find out if they’re REALLY with us!!!
Alito is a good pick, for the fact that he doesn’t snarl when he speaks. Be fun to watch Schumer and Kennedy and Leahy and Feinstein and Biden try to go toe-to-toe with him on Con law.
I agree with AJ. They want to carry theball, they can take the head shots at the goal line.
Well Ann Althouse can hardly be described as the Beltway-conservative establishment. Her preliminary positive reactions are here and here.
Then there is Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy. here and there are plenty of other ones there, so scroll.
I have no choice to basically sit this out until the hearings.
Oh come on, don’t sit it out — oppose now!
It doesn’t matter why or how. The plain simple fact is that Alito voted in favor of partial birth abortion as a fundamental right. We don’t need to go any further than that. There can be and is no good excuse or reason for doing so. Ever. And there is no explaining it away.
Now, some will try to say that he was compelled to do it. In the face of all logic and simple human decency, and despite the fact that the oath he swore was to uphold the Constitution, which is more than Supreme Court precedent and which does not say that murder is a right, they say that he was forced to stand on the side of the butchers because the Supreme Court made him do it. Just like the judges in antebellum America were forcedto return fugitive slaves, just like judges in 1930s Germany were forced to sterilize Jews and send them to concentration camps, because a bunch of judges above them (who think themselves to be “the law,â€) said so, notwithstanding the fact that all human decency cries out against it.
But the fact is that it is quite apparent that in Farmer he didn’t even try to distinguish the N.J. case from Stenberg. He made no attempt to find a way to uphold the N.J. partial birth abortion law. He even rejected a request that the N.J. state courts be allowed to interpret the N.J. law before he struck it down. He made no analysis of the issue at all — he simply summarily, casually, and coldly upheld partial birth abortion as a fundamental right.
And he certainly was not forced to rule that unborn “human beings†are not included within the meaning of “person†contained in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Whitman case had nothing to do with abortion, it was about wrongful death actions, which does not require application of abortion law, which is sui generis. Why the hell else do we permit murder charges for at attack on a pregnant woman that results in the death of the unborn child?
We cannot turn a blind eye to this. We cannot, once again, simply hope and pray and cross our fingers. And like those “intellectual superiors” at NRO so recently taught us, we should not be forced to simply trust that he will do the right thing. Anyone who can ever vote in favor of partial birth abortion — for any reason whatsoever — anyone who can allow himself to be personally involved in abortion, who can cooperate with and participate in such evil, as he did, is not qualified to sit on the Supreme Court or to sit on any court anywhere, even if he does have a fancy degree from an Ivy League school — and especially if he calls himself a Catholic. The Farmer concurrence is indefensible. After that decision, there is nothing that can ever make him acceptable.
Scalito? Ha. He gives every appearance of being Cuomito — “personally opposed, but” bound by his judicial conservatism to give respect to stare decisis and uphold Roe and Casey. Certainly, his decisions until now have shown that it does not violate or bother his conscience one bit to strike down abortion laws and permit the butchery to continue.