"How? Some GOP will take the failure to execute the nuclear option as a GOP failure."
Yes, this is how I see it. I thought I detected fear in Jim Quinn's voice this morning, though his statements are strong. The idea of this line of thinking itself is something I picked up here in FR and have seen nowhere else (wish I remembered the freeper who I got it from).
An email I sent around in the "Stop Specter" campaign illustrates the problem with the idea that the French army the Germans defeated was a different one than the one they would have fought if the French attacked Germany during the invasion of Poland.
http://groups.msn.com/2004CampaignNotes/_whatsnew.msnw
On November 7, Robert Novak wrote that Arlen Specter “…could be denied that post [the Judiciary Committee Chair] by a vote of his Republican colleagues, and several said he will be asked to commit himself to support Bush’s judicial nominees.” The implied plan is to get a loyalty commitment from Specter and then, on the strength of that commitment, elevate him to the Senate Judiciary Committee Chair.
The mistake the Republican Senators contemplate here is similar to the one made by Britain and France in their decision to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. There, Britain and France effectively gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler in return for his “ironclad guarantee” not to invade Poland. Hitler was threatened with war if he broke the agreement.
How do the lessons of Munich apply to the possibility of Specter attaining the Judiciary Chair? Before making an agreement with a man, ask two questions: What are his stated intentions and what is his track record on agreements? One of Hitler’s prominent stated intentions was German domination of the world, as laid out in his book, Mien Kempf. One of Specter’s prominent stated intentions is to prevent strict constructionists from being appointed to the Supreme Court, as laid out in his book, The Passion for Truth. In this regard, Specter’s book proudly recalls his lead role in blocking the Supreme Court confirmation of Robert Bork, who was nominated by President Reagan.
In terms of his previous attitude toward agreements, Hitler had repeatedly violated the Versailles treaty by occupying the Rhineland, rebuilding the German Army, etc. As the “Pittsburgh Post Gazette” (a Liberal newspaper that endorsed Specter in the recent election) pointed out on November 6, “Senator Specter has a bad habit of making different promises to different people and playing them off one another. Thus, after all his recent statements claiming he would support President Bush’s judges, it should come as no surprise that he specifically promised a newspaper’s [the Post Gazette’s] editorial board that he would, in fact block Bush’s conservative and pro-life Supreme Court justices to gain their [the Post Gazette’s] endorsement!”
Having given his word to both sides, Specter has to betray one of them. In his last term, he is trying to achieve a legacy (please the Democrats), not act with political expediency (please the Republicans). Specter’s deeply held, oft expressed conviction is that strict constructionists like Robert Bork are wrong. Specter’s goal is to block such nominees from confirmation to the Supreme Court. Once elevated to the Judiciary Committee Chair, Specter will be helped by the Democratic Senate minority, the convoluted Senate rules of procedure, and a barrage of friendly artillery cover from the media. Combining the power of the Judiciary Chair with the benefit of four terms of practice in ruthless Senate operations, Snarlin’ Arlen will achieve his goal.
A final lesson from the Anglo-French confrontation of Hitler is connected to another idea being discussed: that if the Senators make Specter the Judiciary Chair and he blocks Bush’s appointments, they will later remove him. This is where the French and British inability to take action during the German 1939 invasion of Poland is so instructive. To marshal sufficient forces to quickly conquer Poland, the Germans had to turn their back on the French army and leave their Western Front virtually undefended.
The French army was nearly 100 percent mobilized at the moment of the German attack and had as many troops and tanks as the entire German army, and the French tanks in 1939 were at least as good as those of the Germans (The Unfought Battle, Jon Kimke, Stein and Day Publishers, 1968, p. 88-9, 139). “After months of fearful speculation and intelligence, the French and British allies were at last face to face with the German reality [on the eve of the attack on Poland]. But the ‘psychological block’ to which Churchill had referred was still at work.” (Kimke, p. 89).
While France and Britain did immediately declare war on Germany as soon as Poland was attacked, they took no immediate military action. As Kimke points out (and as Hitler well understood then) even a French attack unsupported by Britain at that time would have almost certainly led to a swift victory over Germany. This would have prevented World War II (Kimke, p. 138). “General Ulrich Liss, the able German officer who had to make a special study of the French forces before and after the outbreak of the war, has rightly warned against judging the fighting capacity of the French soldier of 1939 by what happened in [the French collapse of] the summer of 1940, after Poland had been overrun and after a demoralizing year spent in inexplicable inactivity in the trenches and the fortifications of the Maginot Line (Kimke, p. 139).” Once you’ve appeased an enemy, it is difficult to spring into effective and timely action later.
In the wake of President Bush’s election mandate, the Democratic Party, the Media and allied forces are as weak, in as much disarray and as distracted by their own infighting as they will be for a long time (just as Germany was most vulnerable during the invasion of Poland in 1939). Whatever makes the Senators afraid to act decisively now will only get worse. In addition, removing a sitting chairperson is harder than preventing a person from assuming the chair. If the Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee choose not to act now, they will be unable to act later.
Disclaimer: I am not in any way accusing Arlen Specter of Nazism or anything like that. That would be heinous and also ridiculous. Arlen Specter is Jewish, which would make such a charge especially repugnant. In fact, I am Jewish myself. But all this is quite beside the point of this essay. The point being that the situation faced by the Senate Judiciary Committee today is closely analogous to the situations faced by the French and British when they tried (and failed) to deal with Hitler in 1938 (at Munich) and in 1939 (during the invasion of Poland). In fact, the numerous historical analogies correlate so well that we would ignore them at our peril, if we hope to see Bush successfully nominate non-activist, strict constructionist judges to the Supreme Court.