The only thing that Specter is well grounded in is being an SOB RINO Rat B@$t@rd betrayer. Believe me, he has no corner on understanding the law. Truth be known, he never should have been Senate judiciary chairman in the first place if Repuke senators had any backbone to their spines!
Now having gotten that off my chest, I have to admit that I don't have a good feeling at all about Bush's pending plans or announcement for SCOTUS nomination. Incredibly enough the only group that Bush has chosen to publicly chastise and berate has been the conservative majority base that put he & other Repukes into office. Cowardly Pres Bush didn't even rebuke the DemonRATS for mocking and scorning and making racist comments about Condoleeza Rice (who they derided as Aunt Jemina) or ugly comments about Janice Rogers Brown.... yet Bush blasts the conservatives for voicing the numerous concerns and reservations about Alberto Gonzales, including the fact that Gonzales has declared that "The constitution is what the Supreme Court says it is"! Wow if that is isn't liberal judicial activism at its worst, I don't know what is. The problem is that in reality Pres. Bush is NOT a genuine conservative but rather a closet moderate at best. He used us to to get elected and re-elected....and ever since Nov 2, he has been in retreat!
I don't have a good feeling at all about this. Ever since O'Conner announced her plans to retire from SCOTUS, Pres. Bush has been back pedaling and hedging and positioning himself to announce a "concensus mainstream nominee", which in likelihood will give us another waffling O'Conner or Anthony Kennedy, perhaps even a Souter wannabee.
To my awareness, ever since O'Conner announcement, Pres. Bush has not mentioned at all his campaign promise to nominate judges in the mold of Scalia or Thomas. In fact Pres. Bush has pointedly announced that he will have no litmus tests for the nominees.... in other words, culturally conservative nominees (pro-life, pro-family, pro-Am pledge, pro-10 commandments, pro-constitutional) will not have the inside track and may not even be in his 1st or 2nd tier of candidates, as he had previously led us to believe.
I hope I'm wrong... I hope that Bush surprises us and follows through on his campaign promises for SCOTUS nominees.... but given the scorecard since Nov 2 (conservatives 0, Pres. Bush-GOP cowards-RINOS-DemonRATS 114 or something like that), I will be surprised!!!
It's amusing. Specter was hotly controversial when in Philly. I wasn't really paying attention to local politics then, but it seemed like every day somebody or other was saying kind of loudly, "That #$%$ Specter!"