One of the reasons that I am confident that President Bush made the right choice in selecting Samuel Alito to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court is the fact that the people opposed to the nomination are already acting wacky.
Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and the liberal group People for the American Way rushed out statements blasting the nomination even before Bush announced it at 8 a.m. By the day’s end, much of the organized left had joined the chorus, including the AFL-CIO, NARAL Pro-Choice America, the Alliance for Justice, MoveOn.org and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights.
“After insisting that Harriet Miers shouldn’t even get a hearing because she couldn’t prove she was extreme enough, the far right has now forced the president to choose a nominee that they think has views as extreme as their own,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.).
Reid, who had encouraged Bush to pick Miers, said the Senate would have to investigate whether Alito “is too radical for the American people” and complained of another white male nominee. “President Bush would leave the Supreme Court looking less like America and more like an old boys club,” Reid said.
With opponents like Reid, Schumer, and Kennedy. not to mention NARAL and the rest of the “organized left,” Alito is looking better and better. Its clear that these guys know that a Sam Alito on the Supreme Court would be a threat to 30+ years of leftist legislating from the bench. And, make no doubt that these groups will be pulling out all the stops in opposition to this nomination.
The large body of Alito’s work over 15 years stands in contrast even to that of newly confirmed Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who had served two years on the appellate bench before Bush nominated him. As a result, liberal organizations such as People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice, which spent weeks probing Roberts’s record before opposing him, immediately announced what the first group called a “massive national effort” to defeat Alito.
“Alito’s confirmation could shift the court in a direction that threatens to eviscerate the core protections for women’s freedom guaranteed by Roe v. Wade or overturn the landmark decision altogether,” said NARAL President Nancy Keenan.
This will be the key. As I said yesterday, the left will attempt to turn the Alito nomination into a debate about abortion. Roe v. Wade will be said to be under assault (not a bad thing in my book). And the specter of back-alley abortions will be raised. As Senator Orrin Hatch said yesterday, “This one is going to be Armageddon.”
Other arguments will be raised as well. In today’s Washington Post, Ruth Marcus brings up the diversity argument.
Well, that certainly mixes things up. The first Supreme Court vacancy went to a white Catholic judge who went to Harvard College and Harvard Law School. The second, chances are, will be filled by a white Catholic judge who went to college at Princeton and law school at Yale.
At this rate, a WASP male from Stanford is going to look like a diversity pick.
And it just gets worse from there. This nomination is going to be like Bork and Thomas all over again, all taking place in a country where we now have a 24 hour news cycle. Hopefully, through all of it, we will be able to have a real debate over the role of the Supreme Court in our system of government and the proper exercise of judicial review.
Its gonna be fun.
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