Specter warns Bush on high court nominations

PHILADELPHIA -- The Republican expected to chair the Senate Judiciary Committee next year bluntly warned newly re-elected President Bush today against putting forth Supreme Court nominees who would seek to overturn abortion rights or are otherwise too conservative to win confirmation.

Sen. Arlen Specter, fresh from winning a fifth term in Pennsylvania, also said the current Supreme Court now lacks legal "giants" on the bench.

"When you talk about judges who would change the right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v. Wade, I think that is unlikely," Specter said, referring to the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion.

"The president is well aware of what happened, when a bunch of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster," Specter added, referring to Senate Democrats' success over the past four years in blocking the confirmation of many of Bush's conservative judicial picks. "... And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning."

With at least three Supreme Court justices rumored to be eyeing retirement, including ailing Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Specter, 74, would have broad authority to reshape the nation's highest court. He would have wide latitude to schedule hearings, call for votes and make the process as easy or as hard as he wants.

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., expressed confidence Wednesday that Bush will have more success his second term in winning the confirmation of his judicial nominees.

"I'm very confident that now we've gone from 51 seats to 55 seats, we will be able to overturn this what has become customary filibuster of judicial nominees," Frist said in Orlando, Fla.

Legal scholar Dennis Hutchinson said Specter's message to the White House appears to be "a way of asserting his authority" as he prepares to chair the Judiciary Committee when Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is term-limited from keeping the post next year.

"What he may be trying to do is say, 'Don't just think that I'm going to process what you send through. I have standards, I'm going to take an independent look, you have to deal with me,'" said Hutchinson, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

When asked Wednesday about Specter's impending chairmanship, another Republican on the panel, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, did not offer a ringing endorsement.

"We'll have to see where he stands," said Cornyn, a close friend of Bush who worked to get all of the president's nominees through the Senate. "I'm hoping that he will stand behind the president's nominees. I'm intending to sit down and discuss with him how things are going to work. We want to know what he's going do and how things are going to work."

While Specter is a loyal Republican -- Bush endorsed him in a tight Pennsylvania GOP primary -- he routinely crosses party lines to pass legislation and counts a Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware, as one of his closest friends.

A self-proclaimed moderate, he helped kill President Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court and of Jeff Sessions to a federal judgeship. Specter called both nominees too extreme on civil rights issues. Sessions later became a Republican senator from Alabama and now sits on the Judiciary Committee with Specter.

Despite a bruising challenge from conservatives this year in Pennsylvania's GOP primary, Specter won re-election Tuesday by an 11-point margin by appealing to moderate Republicans and ticket-splitting Democrats, even as Pennsylvania chose Democrat John Kerry over Bush.

A former district attorney, Specter also bemoaned what he called the lack of any current justices comparable to legal heavyweights like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Louis Brandeis, Benjamin Cardozo and Thurgood Marshall, "who were giants of the Supreme Court."

"With all due respect to the (current) U.S. Supreme Court, we don't have one," he said.

Though he refused to describe the political leanings of the high court, Specter said he "would characterize myself as moderate; I'm in the political swim. I would look for justices who would interpret the Constitution, as Cardozo has said, reflecting the values of the people

Thanks for the ping, Dan (and John and Les, on other threads with the same painful topic :).

I am in the DC environs right now – on a bike trip with a girlfriend -- we are planning to bike the C&O Canal Towpath, through West Virginia/Virginia/Maryland/DC in the early Spring, and came down here this weekend to do a partial practice run, and to unwind from election ‘stuff’. She’s as early-to-bed gal, so I am left with no companionship but my trusty laptop. :)

More than half a million Pennsylvanians foresaw the current major crisis that is facing us regarding the potential appointment of Arlen Specter as chair of the senate Judiciary Committee. That’s why, despite big money/strong-arm tactics/profligate lies/temporary democrat primary registration crossovers (all committed by the Specter forces alone), Pat Toomey, a virtual unknown, came within 1.5% of winning the Pennsylvania Republican senate nomination in April. The four-term incumbent Specter won by a mere 16,000 votes, with more than one million votes cast. And Toomey would have won by a comfortable margin, had the President and our junior senator placed principle before political protocol and endorsed him rather than his unworthy opponent, who sports a long history of deceit and betrayal.

I am also certain that Toomey would have won the senate seat handily on Tuesday, and not only would we not be faced with the specter of a Specter chairmanship of Judiciary, but we would have a junior senator with major Reagan-esque leanings sitting in one of Pennsylvania’s senate seats. But, as they say, that’s water under the bridge. I simply hope that President Bush now has a new, and exquisitely personal, understanding of the phrase biting the hand that feeds you. Arlen Specter has one mean and powerful bite.

To those Pennsylvanians who have followed Specter’s infamous four-term career, it reads like an immutable script: (1) enter, stage right, having counted on moderates and conservatives to return you to the stage to begin with; (2) spend about five and a half years moving consistently stage left, while arrogantly defending yourself against those who, dutifully and sincerely, remind you that you are not playing the role you were cast to play; and then (3) half-heartedly meander back toward the right for the six months preceding your next re-election bid, hoping that the move right will eclipse the previous five and a half years of leftist role-playing. It always worked … until Pat Toomey shined a spotlight on the shenanigans. We’re wise to you now, Arlen. And it’s a good thing for you this is most likely your last term. Toomey would defeat you resoundingly in 2010.

Specter’s duplicity dates back to the mid-1960s, when he sat on the Warren Commission and formulated the ‘single-bullet theory’ to explain Oswald’s assassination of JFK. There are many right-minded people who believe he is responsible for a major cover-up of that crime, and its ramifications.

Around twenty years later, when Ronald Reagan nominated Jeff Sessions (who now providentially/coincidentally sits on the Judiciary Committee with Arlen) for a federal judgeship, Specter betrayed his constituents by voting with the democrats in killing the nomination. This betrayal marked the beginning of the now-common act of killing the nominations of those with whom you don’t share a political ideology … and the Constitution be damned. Before Sessions’ defeat, a federal judicial nominee had only been turned down once in the four decades since the Roosevelt administration. So Arlen Specter effectively set the stage for politicized judicial confirmations – a mighty arrogant, and toxic, unconstitutional precedent that laid the groundwork for the awarding of judgeships based on leftist political ideology.

And Arlen continued wielding his leftist-agenda-driven power the following year, when Reagan nominated Robert Bork to sit on the Supreme Court. Bork had a sterling resume as a judge, and a Yale law professor (one needs only read his Slouching Towards Gomorrah to comprehend the sheer genius, judicial purity, and uncompromising allegiance to the Constitution that this giant of a man represents). Specter played a major role in Bork’s defeat, and I, for one, will never forgive him for his vicious character assassination of a man whose shoes he isn’t fit to shine.

Some believe that Specter regained his principles (although it’s difficult to regain that which one never possessed to begin with) when he defended Clarence Thomas against the left’s attacks in 1991. But one only needs to look at the timing of the Thomas hearings to understand Specter’s newfound fairness. The hearings occurred less than a year before Specter’s next re-election bid. Too little time to erase from the memory of conservative Pennsylvanians yet another betrayal. So he was forced to do what was right … simply because of the timing of the hearings.

Specter’s final betrayal occurred during the Clinton senate impeachment trial in 1998, during which he could have played a major role in ridding us of the most immoral, treasonous, criminal President we have ever known. Instead, he effectively ignored the US Constitution, and instead relied on (purported) ‘Scottish Law’ to allow the President to continue his reign of horror. He asserted that under the venerable ‘Scottish Law’ (which appears to trump the American Constitution), there are three possible verdicts in an impeachment trial: guilty, not guilty, and not proven. Voting ‘not proven’ (and enjoying the dubious distinction of being the only senator to do so) allowed him a cowardly retreat from alienating either his genuine leftist base, or the conservative/moderate supporters he needed to fool, yet again.

Chief Justice Rehnquist was so taken aback by the stupidity of Specter’s argument that he ordered Specter’s verdict to be recorded as ‘not guilty’.

Arlen Specter’s crimes against our republic have been many. But I believe the four above are the most grievous. He should not even be sitting in the US Senate, much less chairing the committee that will have enormous impact on the seating of federal judges, in an era in which activist judges have assumed the arrogant role of declaring the Constitution irrelevant when it comes to matters of leftist societal engineering.

As I see it, the two most uplifting results of Tuesday’s election are (1) that we can now hope to enjoy four more years of effective national leadership, where the war on terror -- the most important issue of our, or any, time -- is concerned, and (2) that we also have a President in office who will nominate conservative judges to the Supreme Court, so that the court will take a much needed turn to the right, and place the Constitution back on the lofty pedestal where it rightly belongs.

I urge every American to call (letters, petitions, and e-mails are not as effective) your own state senators, Majority Leader Frist, and the President, and share your gnawing concerns about the long-term disastrous effect that a Specter chairmanship would have on the moral/societal fabric of our republic – during a time when we should be rebuilding, not further dismantling.

~ joanie

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