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I've read the other threads that say Toomey would lose against the Democrat. But I still thought this was an interesting side note to the election. Wish he could somehow win it all.

Spector and Hatch are both dangerous to the survival of conservative values.

Memogate

By Manuel Miranda
Sunday, April 18, 2004

Pittsburgh has a unique link to the past in the judicial nominations wars. And every Republican in America knows that Pennsylvania holds the key to the future in the coming Republican primary that may decide who the next Senate Judiciary Committee chairman is -- or is not.
Before moving to Utah, Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) first practiced law in Pittsburgh. In those days, he was a liberal Democrat. The profitable industry that has grown around obstructing nominees would not be what it is if it were not for Hatch's unique manner, or Arlen Specter's populist votes against Jeff Sessions (now the senator from Alabama) and Robert Bork (as in "borking") in the 1980s.

Those early liberal victories were the playground where today's highly paid judge-killers first shaped their career plans. Hatch's recent role in Memogate, at the sad end of his chairmanship, tells the rest of the story as to how the bullies he calls friends have been emboldened over the years.

Pocket liberals

For three years, and especially during the Jim Jeffords interregnum when Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) controlled the Senate Judiciary Committee, Hatch repeatedly warned Americans that Democrats were in the pocket of liberal special interest groups in their unprecedented obstruction of President Bush's judicial nominees. Hatch's alarm was so compelling that a National Review cover displayed Leahy sitting as chairman connected to puppet strings hanging above him.

Last year, Senate Republicans led by Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) argued that Miguel Estrada, the first judicial nominee ever filibustered, was being blocked by Democrats for no other reason than he was Hispanic.

On the day that Estrada withdrew, Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) stated the case with surgical precision. Democrats, he said, were intent on preventing George Bush from having a qualified Hispanic serving on an appellate court that the president could elevate to the Supreme Court, should a vacancy arise.

How can one then understand the surrender of Senate Republicans in the Memogate affair? When presented with proof positive that liberal special interest groups were so much in control of Senate Democrats that they actually cast votes at their meetings in directing what judicial nominee should get a hearing and who should be rejected, who could imagine that Orrin Hatch could lead the charge to surrender?

Evidence & retreat

When presented with Democrat memos stating the reason for blocking Estrada was "because ... he is Latino," and Democrats did not want to repeat their mistake in confirming Clarence Thomas to a lower court, who could imagine that Republicans would not only retreat but burn down their crops as they went?

And to add injury to self-inflicted wound, as reward for collaborating with Democrat obstruction in Memogate, Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) promptly promised Republicans that no more appellate court confirmations would occur this year.

The frustration of Republicans across the country over Memogate is well known to me as the wounded staffer abandoned in the Republican retreat. It is also understandable. We know that Majority Leader Frist has a Republican majority, but not a conservative majority solid enough to defeat the Democrat filibusters. We accept that. But Memogate was a skirmish Republicans could have won. It was an opportunity misunderstood by key staffers more skilled at keeping the trains running than in their senators' lasting reputations.

Emasculated GOP

The essence of the Republican surrender was not just the abandonment of loyal staff, it was the submission to the word "improper." Democrats seized on Orrin Hatch's early judge-and-jury statement that the reading of the memos had been improper.

By bowing to Hatch's ill-advised leadership on the propriety of reading the Democrat memos, Republicans rendered themselves emasculated from investigating the corruption evidenced in the Democrat memos themselves -- those made public and the hundreds of others still under wraps.

Hatch's need to be right, even with the use of whisper campaigns to keep his colleagues under rein, was more than surrender. Other senators were forced to abandon the field entirely.

Hatch told Frist that if I resigned my position, Democrats would be assuaged. The matter would end. It didn't. Hatch told me that if I resigned, he would return the focus to the substance of the memos. He didn't.

Frist told conservative leaders that having me resign would be best for me. It wasn't. Nor was it best for my young family. Frist told conservative leaders, as did other Republican senators, the line that Hatch had fed them -- that the investigation would find an illegal hacking. It didn't.

'Seduced by access'

Frist was duped. Most conservative leaders inside the beltway also allowed themselves to be duped because, at the end, Washingtonians are easily seduced by the access that gives status. But one has to forgive well-meaning people who are duped.

Throughout Memogate, Hatch cleverly prevented colleagues from contradicting him, preventing them from arguing what they came to know: that the reading of nonconfidential Democrat documents on an unprotected computer server was not improper -- because it was not illegal, was not contrary to Senate rules, and was not a violation of any applicable code of ethics.

As one computer security expert wrote, this affair wasn't Memogate, it was Memogate-less. Democrat gross negligence had made their memos available as if they had been left "in the Capitol rotunda."

I do admit that reading these documents on an unprotected server to help defend the president's embattled nominees was political hardball, and I have learned that one shouldn't play hardball with limpwristed teammates.

So where is the future in the crisis of federal judicial nominations? It is in the Senate elections of 2004 and 2006, when voters can restore the depleted number of principled conservatives and reduce the number of Republican senators too concerned about appearances -- and not enough about fairness and loyalty.

Manuel Miranda resigned in February as counsel to Senate Republican leader Bill Frist after volunteering that he had read unprotected Democrat documents available on a shared file server of the Senate Judiciary Committee published in the media in November 2003. A Senate inquiry subsequently confirmed that more than 150 Judiciary staffers of both parties had open access to each other's documents without any improper hacking, but that only two Republican staffers admitted to reading the Democrat memos. Miranda also is former counsel to Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch. His father is a native of Beaver Falls.

Dobson Emphatically Endorses Pro-Family Republican in Penn. Senate Primary
Dr. Dobson would endorse Satan himself were he pro-life, pro-God, and pro-liberty.

People of principle are so predictable.

How many Dobsons = a GWB?

PITTSBURGH -- Pittsburgh is once again in the political spotlight Monday night as President George W. Bush attends a fund-raiser to support Sen. Arlen Specter at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center.

This is tonight. I wonder if this is the mission he received from the Lord.

ping