Posted on 11/05/2004 8:05:42 AM PST by jebanks
Look to who he's supported in the past, not to sound bites from the media. Spector says he didn't say what they've quoted him to say. Are you going to believe him or the media? ;)
I just called too. Thanks for the number.
I just called Cornyn's office...Gawd..I love the southern drawl....lovely lady....so polite..encouraged her to tell her boss to keep Spector out of the SJC chair...she said she's getting a LOT of calls... I said that IMHO, HE should be the chair..she laughed..
Want to make a bet on that, cowboy?
I can tell you we are VERY close to winning on this one.
He's a 42 on the ACU ratings, which is good enough for me as well. It is good enough for me to say HELL NO.
I have worked this issue for quite some time on the Hill and he is a consistent thorn in the side. So rather than concentrating on working the other side, we constantly have to make sure that Ol' Arlen isn't having any gas pain.
This will NOT be useful in the Supreme Court battle, which, as Arlen correctly pointed out, is imminent. Not next June, not next spring, IMMINENT.
I'm a NRA member, not an ACU (American Conservative Union???) member. I am not concerned with Sen. Spector's politics on any issue except the Second Amendment.
Please contact GOP Judiciary Committee members to express your disapproval of Specter:
http://stopspecter.savethegop.com/index.php?page=act
I am right there with you, my friend, on the Second Amendment. In fact, I was a keynote speaker at the Second Amendment sisters rally against the Million Moms silliness.
And I firmly believe that it is the cartridge box that will ultimately protect our other freedoms -- the jury box, the ballot box and the soap box.
As a fellow gun owner, I understand your passion and committment to that issue. But the ENTIRE constitution is in danger with activist judges. If one part crumbles, the other parts can collapse as well. Specter is a part of that problem with his activist philosophy.
So I am asking you to reconsider.
I'll consider what you said, and you consider this. Sen. Spector helped confirm Renquist, O'Connor, Kennedy, and Thomas, not exactly activists.
Understood. But please understand that I marinate in the judicial nominations process for a living. This is what I do EVERY day. And let me assure you that it has been Arlen Specter, among other RINOs, who has been a thorn in our sides. Rather than concentrating on leftists who want to not only defeat nominees, but destroy them, we had to spend inordinate amounts of time on making sure that Arlen was on board.
That is NOT someone we need as Chairman at a time when we are going into the Super Bowl of nominations battles.
Want a list of his crimes against humanity? Don't believe me? Ann's got something to say on the subject. Here ya go:
Donkey Trapped In Elephant's Body
By Ann Coulter (www.anncoulter.com)
April 21, 2004
Except for the presidential election, the most important election this year will take place on April 27 in Pennsylvania. No, it's not the "American Idol" finals. It's even more important than that. That's the day of the Republican primary pitting a great Republican, Pat Toomey, against the 74-year-old, Ira Einhorn-defending alleged "Republican," Arlen Specter.
Thanks to Arlen Specter:
States can't prohibit partial-birth abortion;
Voluntary prayer is banned at high-school football games;
Flag-burning is a constitutional right;
The government is allowed to engage in race discrimination in college admissions;
The nation has been forced into a public debate about gay marriage;
We have to worry about whether the Supreme Court will allow "under God" to be removed from the Pledge of Allegiance.
More than any other person in America, Arlen Specter is responsible for a runaway Supreme Court that has turned every political issue into a "constitutional" matter, giving radical liberals an uninterrupted string of victories in the culture wars. That's not a court, it's a junta.
In a democratic process, liberals could never persuade Americans to vote for their insane ideas - abortion on demand, gay marriage and adoption, handgun confiscation, cross-district busing, abolishing the death penalty and affirmative action quotas. So issues are simply taken out of the voters' hands by the Supreme Court. Vitally important cultural issues are now decided for us by a handful of unelected elites, who, coincidentally, share the ideology of Janeane Garofalo. It's a lot easier to get a majority out of nine votes than it is to get a majority of 280 million votes.
As long as liberals have a majority of Supreme Court justices in their pockets, they never have to persuade their fellow countrymen to support any of their crackpot ideas. They just sit around waiting for the Supreme Court to give them the "nine thumbs up!" sign to abortion on demand.
When Reagan was president, he threatened to appoint justices who would not discover nonexistent "penumbras," which mysteriously read like a People for the American Way press release, and to return these issues to voters. The uneducated bumpkin Reagan's radical notion was that judges don't write laws, they interpret them.
Liberals exploded in righteous anger - an emotion they've never mustered toward Islamic terrorists, I note. Still, all their theatrics would have been for naught and we would already have our democracy back - but for Arlen Specter.
Specter voted against a slew of conservative Reagan appointees, including Jeff Sessions to a federal appellate court (Sessions now sits with Specter on what must be a rather chilly Senate Judiciary Committee) and Brad Reynolds to be associate attorney general. But his epochal vote was against Reagan's nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court.
Liberals waged a vicious campaign of vilification against Bork, saying he would bring back segregated lunch counters, government censorship and "rogue police" engaging in midnight raids. No one expects more of Teddy Kennedy. But when a senator with an "R" after his name opposed Bork, it was over.
Specter pretended to weigh the attacks on Bork thoughtfully and after careful consideration announced he would vote against Bork. By exploiting the fact that he calls himself a "Republican" - despite voting with John Kerry more often than he voted with Ronald Reagan - Specter gave cover to the left's portrayal of decent, God-fearing Americans who love their country as being about one step away from David Duke. As the first Republican to oppose Bork publicly, Specter ensured that other craven "moderates" would soon follow suit.
The Bork fiasco utterly cauterized the Republicans. After that, Republican administrations were terrified of nominating anyone provably to the right of Susan Sarandon. Instead of legal giants like Judge Robert Bork, we ended up with Anthony Kennedy and David Hackett Souter on the Supreme Court.
Since Bork, Republican presidents have put three justices on the court. Two of the three gaze upon a document that says absolutely nothing about abortion or sodomy and discern a "constitutional" right to both. (But try as they might, they still haven't been able to discern a woman's constitutional right to defend herself from rapists by carrying a pistol in her purse.) Because of the court's miraculous discovery of a right to sodomy last term, gay marriage is now on the agenda in America.
The nation waits with bated breath to see if, this term, the court will strike "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Liberals are so desperate for this to happen that some of them are actually praying for it. The only reason to hope the court might let us keep saying "under God" is that it's an election year. Like Arlen Specter, the Supreme Court often gets religion whenever normal Americans are about to vote.
Luckily for the country, Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court a year before Specter was up for re-election. After supporting Thomas, Specter turned around and started bellyaching that Thomas was a "disappointment" presumably for Thomas' failure to ferret out any more "new" constitutional rights such as gay marriage or taxpayer-subsidized penis augmentation. Don't hope for any more election-year conversions if Specter is re-elected: The old coot will be 80 years old by the end of the term.
Some Republicans seem to imagine that Specter has a better chance of winning the general election by appealing to Democrats and thereby helping Bush - than Pat Toomey does. This is absurd. Just because Republicans hate Specter doesn't mean Democrats like him. It's no wonder Pennsylvania often votes Democratic. If Arlen Specter represented the Republican Party, I'd be a Democrat, too.
I won't believe either Specter OR the media.
I'll believe the transcript.
And gosh! Here it is:
>
> November 3, 2004
> Transcript
>
>
> JORDAN: Senator, you didn't talk about the Judiciary
> Committee, it is something you are expected to Chair this January.
> With 3 Supreme Court Justices rumored to retire soon, starting with
> Rehnquist, how do you see this unfolding in the next couple of months
> and what part do you intend to play on it?
>
> SPECTER: You know my approach is cautious with respect to
> the Judiciary Committee. I am in line, Senator Hatch is barred now by
> term limits and Senate Rules so that I am next in line. There has to
> be a vote of the Committee and I have already started to talk to some
> of my fellow committee members. I am respectful of Senate traditions,
> so I am not designating myself Chairman, I will wait for the Senate
> procedures to act in do course. You are right on the substance, the
> Chief Justice is gravely ill. I had known more about that than had
> appeared in the media. When he said he was going to be back on
> Monday, it was known inside that he was not going to be back on
> Monday. The full extent of his full incapacitation is really not
> known, I believe there will be cause for deliberation by the
> President. The Constitution has a clause called advise and consent,
> the advise part is traditionally not paid a whole lot of attention to,
> I wouldn't quite say ignored, but close to that. My hope that the
> Senate will be more involved in expressing our views. We start off
> with the basic fact that the Democrats are have filibustered and
> expect them to filibuster if the nominees are not within the broad
> range of acceptability. I think there is a very broad range of
> Presidential Discretion but there is a range.
>
> ODOM: Is Mr. Bush, he just won the election, even with
> the popular vote as well. If he wants anti-abortion judges up there,
> you are caught in the middle of it what are you going to do? The
> party is going one way and you are saying this.
>
> SPECTER: When you talk about judges who would change the
> right of a woman to choose, overturn Roe v Wade, I think that is
> unlikely. And I have said that bluntly during the course of the
> campaign and before. When the Inquirer endorsed me, they quoted my
> statement that Roe v Wade was inviolate. And that 1973 decision,
> which has been in effect now for 33 years, was buttressed by the 1992
> decision, written by three Republican justices-O'Conner, Souter, and
> Kennedy-and nobody can doubt Anthony Kennedy's conservativism or
> pro-life position, but that's the fabric of the country. Nobody can be
> confirmed today who didn't agree with Brown v. Board of Education on
> integration, and I believe that while you traditionally do not ask a
> nominee how they're going to decide a specific case, there's a
> doctorate and a fancy label term, stari decisis, precedent which I
> think protects that issue. That is my view, now, before, and always.
>
>
> ODOM: You are saying the President should not bother
> to send somebody up there like that.
>
> SPECTER: Can't hear you
>
> ODOM: You are saying the President should not bother
> or make the move to send somebody up there who is clearly
> anti-abortion.
>
> SPECTER: I don't want to prejudge what the President is
> going to do. But the President is well aware of what happened when a
> number of his nominees were sent up, were filibustered, and the
> President has said he is not going to impose a litmus test, he faced
> that issue squarely in the third debate and I would not expect the
> President, I would expect the President to be mindful of the
> considerations that I mentioned.
>
> JORDAN: However, Senator the President has President has sent
> up, as you know, a number of very very conservative judges socially,
> you have made a point in this campaign of saying that you have
> supported all of those ______ at least I the last two years, how is
> this going to square with what you are saying today about wanting the
> Republican party to be big tent and moderate.
>
> SPECTER: I have been very careful in what I have said and
> what I have done. The nominees whom I supported in Committee, I had
> reservations on. As for judge Pryor, there had been an issue as to
> whether as Attorney General he had raised money, I said in voting him
> out of committee, that he did not have my vote on the floor until I
> satisfied myself about collateral matters. The woman judge out of
> California, who had dismissed a case on invasion of privacy where the
> doctor had permitted an insurance adjuster to watch a mammogram, I had
> a reservation on it, so I wanted to talk to her to see if that was
> aberrational or whether that really reflected her judgment on each and
> every one of those cases. This may be more detail than you want, but
> there was one judge for a district judgeship, Judge Holmes, in
> Arkansas, who was first in his class at the University of Arkansas,
> had a PhD from Duke, had a master's degree, was touted by both
> Democratic Arkansas Senators, was supported by 2 pro-choice women,
> Senator Landrieu and Senator Lincoln, highly regarded in the Arkansas
> editorial pages, and for a district court judgeship I thought. He had
> made two statements, and they were, one was in a religious context
> that a wife should be subservient to a husband, that was in a
> religious context. Then he made a statement doubting the potential
> for impregnation from rape, and made an absurd statement that it would
> be as rare as snow in Florida in July. That was about a 20 year-old
> statement and I brought him in and sat down, had a long talk with him
> and concluded that they were not disqualifiers. He was the only judge
> whom I voted to confirm on the floor vote where any question has been
> raised and I think that was the right decision for a district court
> judgeship, not to make that a disqualifier. There are few if any
> whose record if you go back over 30 or 40 years, and not find some
> dumb thing, I don't want you to take a to close a look at my 40 year
> record.
>
> HIGHSMITH: Talk to us a little bit beyond judgeships, you
> said again today and last night that your goal now is to moderate the
> party, bring it to the center.
>
> SPECTER: Correct
>
> [BREAK-Bringing the Country Together Question]
>
> [BREAK-Stem Cell Question]
>
> MACINTOSH: What are the characteristics that you are
> looking for in any candidate for the high court who might come your
> way in the next year or two?
>
> SPECTER: Well I would like to see a select someone in the
> mold of Holmes, Brandeis, Cardozo, or Marshall. With all due respect
> to the U.S. Supreme Court, we don't have one. And I haven't minced
> any words about that during the confirmation process.
>
> MACINTOSH: Meaning?
>
> SPECTER: Where I have questioned them all very closely.
> I had an argument before the Supreme Court of the United States on
> trying to keep the Navy base, and you should heard what the eight of
> them had to say to me. They were almost as tough as this gang here
> this morning.
>
> ODOM: Senator, the judges you mentioned are obviously
> renown. Are you saying that there are no greatness on there, is that
> what you're driving at?
>
> SPECTER: Yes. Can you take yes for an answer Vernon?
> I'm saying that we don't have anybody of the stature of Oliver Wendell
> Holmes, or Willy Brandeis, or Cardozo, or Marshall. That's what I'm
> saying. I'm saying that we have a court which they're graduates from
> the Court of Appeals from the District of Columbia basically, some
> other Circuit Courts of Appeals. I think that we could use, and I am
> repeating myself again, a Holmes or a Brandeis.
>
> ODOM: Would you resign to take the appointment?
> You're the only person I can think of?
>
> SPECTER: I can think of quite a few other people.
>
> JORDAN: Like who?
>
> SPECTER: I think there's some possibility, just a slight
> possibility, I may not be offered the appointment.
>
> JORDAN: Senator, who do you think would be a good candidate?
>
> SPECTER: For the Supreme Court?
>
> JORDAN: Yes.
>
> SPECTER: I have some ideas but I'm going to withhold my
> comments. If, as, and when the President asks that question, Lara,
> I'll have some specific information for him. In the alternative, if
> you become President, I'll have it for you.
>
> [BREAK-Election 2010 question]
>
> [BREAK-Iraq questions]
>
> Jordan: Do you expect to continue supporting all of
> President Bush's judicial nominees?
>
> AS: I am hopeful that I'll be able to do that. That
> obviously depends upon the President's judicial nominees. I'm hopeful
> that I can support them.
>
> [BREAK-Election question]
>
> [End Press Conference]
With phone calls, they first try to distinguish calls from actual constituents vs. those from the general public. If they can, they'll get your address as a way to check which category you fit in. Most offices keep a sort of summary or tally sheet, noting the issue(s) they receive calls about, the number of people calling about it, and the number who are for and against. They may make note of sample opinions on both sides. They put all the data into a daily compendium for their boss.
They do something similar with emails. General emails from constituents will receive some kind of auto response. Those from the general public may or may not receive a response (most likely not, since resources are usually limited and the number of emails on hot issues is usually high).
Next in the peckig order are post cards or letters from the general public. These will be handled similarly to phone calls. Data just goes into a compendium.
Letters from constituents are always answered in some way. How depends on the nature of the letter. If it just offers an opinion on an issue, it will most likely be answered by a staffer with a broadly worded response explaining their boss's position on the matter.
The letters most likely to actually get to the attention of the senator or congress-critter are personal ones from constituents, and which are those: (a) offering some kind of specific support, (b) seeking help with a specific problem or matter, and which a staffer can't address, (c) seeking information about a particular issue of importance to the state or congressional district, and, again, which a staffer can't address, (d) offering a personally, individually, and reasonably well-expressed opinion on an issue. This latter type has the best chance of being placed with the daily compendium of constituent and public communications that are brought to the personal attention of the boss.
Hope this helps.
YEA!
BTTT
BUMP
I have to tell you, first off, that I'm not much of an Ann Coulter fan. I like some sarcasm, but I don't like her constant sarcasm on issues that don't deserve it. I don't care if "under God" is removed from the Pledge, since I'm not very religious, and since Conservatives are the ones who put it in there in 1954 or so, just to show off to the "godless" commies.. I don't believe the current court is a Garofalo court, either. I can't seriously listen to someone who exaggerates to the right as much as Michael Moore exaggerates to the left.
Thanks for the civics lesson, but I already have read this. I always consider who a person is talking to before I judge what they say.
I emailed my Senators Lott and Cochran. Also emailed Senator Frist. Sean is on now saying we may have to oppose Senator Specter, It'll be up to the Senator...FR is way out in front with this...
I emailed my Senator Saxby Chambliss (GA). Told him we gave him 2 votes in 2002 and the GOP a mandate this year. We expect better than the Specter of a liberal in charge of the Judiciary Committee.
Please don't misquote me. I said that I was not concerned with Sen. Specter's politics, except on the Right To Bear Arms issue. I did not say I have no concerns outside that. The politics of appointed justices is very important to me, but Sen. Specter isn't an appointed justice, he is elected and more accountable for what he does and says. I never said I didn't like Ms. Coulter, just what she says sometimes. I need no enlightening on the Ann Coulter issue, thanks, I can read. This enables me to be quite able to see what most folks here think about her; I just don't think that way, that's all.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.