Posted on 07/10/2005 8:01:30 PM PDT by hispanarepublicana
President Bush will nominate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to be chief justice of the Supreme Court after William Rehnquist joins Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and announces his retirement, Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol predicted on Sunday.
"The chief justice will step down this week," Kristol, who accurately forecast last month that O'Connor would be the first to go, told "Fox News Sunday."
"The president is planning to announce two nominations for those vacancies before he leaves for Crawford at the end of the month," he predicted. "I've been told that the White House has told certain people to keep their calendars clear for July 26 and 27." Kristol said sources "close to the White House and at the Justice Department" have told him that "the president wants to nominate Attorney General Gonzales to be chief justice."
The well-connected commentator predicted that tapping a moderate like Gonzales to head the court would "demoralize" Bush's conservative base, which has waged a 30-year battle to change the ideological balance of the high court.
"I think if the president nominates Gonzales, it will be disastrous for the Republican Party," Kristol said. "It will have a bad effect on the Bush administration for the rest of its term."
He contended that a Gonzales nomination would be "the equivalent of the [1990] budget deal," when Bush's father reneged on his promise not to raise taxes.
For once, Kristol is right. It will be a disaster for the Republican party. Much more importantly, it will be a disaster for this country.
Bush apparently wants to push Gonzalez because he's Bush's "friend." Sorry, Mr. Bush, that's not good enough for the rest of us. I don't care if he is your friend and you resent anyone expressing reservations about him. And I don't think a qualification to the S.C. is met because you want to pander to Hispanic voters on behalf of future GOP candidates.
I don't want an O'Connor-type "moderate" on the bench. I want someone who will faithfully interpret the constitution, not vote their "feelings" and "penumbras", or otherwise twist the constitution out of shape by claiming it's a "living, breathing document."
How about doing just this one favor for conservatives before leaving office, and perhaps we'll try to forget the scores of other times you have so sorely disappointed us.
I am proud of my ancestors' heritage, but my heritage is American (well, Texan). I don't get your use of the liberal term "Latino" and your defense of the liberal term "Chicano" versus "Hispanic".
I do not believe that belonging to an organization that targets or is for just one ethnicity can go hand in hand with "assimilating". I know plenty of American hispanics who have made a "career" out of being Hispanic, and I do not agree with that. I do not believe in organizations that use the phrase "Italian American" or "Irish American" or "Mexican American". I especially have a problem with Gonzalez's affiliation with the National Council of La Raza and their liberal policies.
Perhaps my strong views about assimilation were founded in my elementary school education, when we would open our "Reading" textbooks and the stories written by Hispanics were ALWAYS about being Hispanic. Meanwhile, the stories written by Americans with Italian names or Irish names or German names were about fire engines or trees or food or toys or.....you get my drift.
If you'll notice, the Americans of Irish, German, Italian, Greek heritage tend not to belong to organizations like their version of LULAC or La Raza or the NAACP, and they are NOT pandered to as a voting block, etc. In my view, the American Irish, Italians, Germans, Greeks, etc., are much more "mature" politically because they don't seperate themselves off like Hispanics and Blacks do. I detest being pandered to, but we bring much of that on ourselves by belonging to organizations like LULAC and "La Raza".
Finally, I don't get your berating me rudely for my supposed "cuban" flag or whatever on my profile page, then not apologizing when I called you on the carpet about it.
Gozalez is just wrong.
He is too much a rino based on the comentary here.
We need someone who is willing to connect constitutional law back to the constitution.
Another wishy washy lawyer is not going to cut it.
PS: Forgot to include in earlier reply: Do you not know who Lucy Ramirez is? That's not an ethnic reference, it's a dig at the whole Rather Memogate situation.
Lucy, you are better than cool; you have common sense.
Gonzalez has been okay as AG. However, the recent history of the Supreme Court should have taught us one thing:
We need to nominate justices who are more conservative than we actually need, because once they get their lifetime appointment, they always move leftward.
That's right on. I'm old enough to remember O'Connor and how she drifted left.
What he decided was that any vagueness in the law meant the most pro-abortion interpretation was necessary, even though such an interpretation would be clearly contrary to the legislative intent of the law. The legislature made their intent quite clear by angrily rewriting the law. He did what O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter and Stevens have always done: he found an excuse to rule as a liberal.
True. LULAC could almost be justifiable to some moderate conservarives to have been in; It was not established as a Democratic/Stalinist organ, but rather simply representing a people who were relatively liberal, and like all interest groups, drifted to the left to follow the money.
But La Raza was established as a manifestly leftist and racist organization.
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