Martin Ginsburg, justice's husband, dies

I agree. Basically, I think it’s always better to take your chances on the nominees of a Republican president than, in this day and age of the Dems being the Party of Death, and, now, more broadly Progressive.

Something else has changed since Reagan’s nominations. The internet was created! (Thanks, Algore!) Previously, We the People could watch some of the hearings on TV if we were so inclined, and maybe send a snailmail letter to our Senators, but there really wasn’t even close to the amount of access to information about nominees — or to the opportunity we have to provide real-time, instant feedback to our elected officials — that we have now because of the internet and, related, the information platform of talk radio.

This is how and why conservatives were able to derail the Miers’ nomination. We really could not have raised that much hell, that effectively, prior to widespread use of the internet for political discourse. Nor would we have known nearly so much about Harriet without the internet and talk radio — basically, we’d only have known what the MSM deigned to tell us.

In my view, this greatly increases the chance that a Republican president will be more accountable and careful in his nominations. Millions will be vetting those nominees for themselves and the pushback can be fierce and instant.

Moreover, and very importantly, this relatively new interactive process between the president and his base on nominations also WORKS TO PROVIDE THE PRESIDENT EFFECTIVE POLITICAL COVER.

Bush never could have nominated John Roberts out of the gate — we didn’t have his back then, because we weren’t paying attention. Once the grassroots got worked up about Miers and it was clear we were DEMANDING a stronger nominee, Bush had the clout to go with a stronger nominee. You can guarantee the main reason Bush nominated Miers is he thought he was in a weak position politically to get a stronger nominee through. Once his grassroots was fired up, he was able to shove that in the Rats’ faces, though.

So I always said even if President McCain did nominate a dud, we would have a much greater chance of influencing the outcome — maybe even forcing a withdrawal as we did with Miers — than if we had a Rat president who only used our opposition as fodder for DNC fundraising letters. It’s better to have a seat at the table than not!

We see this now with Kagan. We, grassroots conservatives, don’t have nearly the ability to get to pushback on this nomination because we don’t have the president’s ear, DEMS do.

Too many people failed to grasp how much more interactive the nomination process is now compared to recent history, so long as (1) the president represents the party that the pushback is coming from, and (2) the grassroots gets up and raises hell.

Too often I heard, “McCain won’t appoint any better justices than Obama” — a ridiculous, sad, puke-inducing analysis, then and even more so now. But even if that were true, we would have at least had the opportunity to raise hell about our own nominee (a la Miers), whereas we don’t have a prayer of anyone in the Rat party paying attention to our objections.

I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t oppose poor nominees by this president, I’m just stating that there were many reasons to avoid handing power to the Rats on a silver platter in 2008, and the opportunity to have REAL input into the president’s SCOTUS nominations was an important one of those.

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