Posted on 10/30/2005 2:21:21 AM PST by RWR8189
The choice of Harriet Miers to be nominated to the Supreme Court, and her subsequent withdrawal, shows that caution is sometimes the most dangerous policy.
She was obviously chosen cautiously as a "stealth" nominee -- someone without a paper trail or a judicial record that could ignite controversy -- in hopes of avoiding a confirmation fight that the Senate Republicans had the votes to win, but had neither the unity nor the guts required to make victory certain.
Harriet Miers was a choice made from political weakness. Now she is gone but the political weakness remains. So celebrations in conservative quarters may be premature.
Liberal Senators have already gained from the time lost with the Miers nomination and they have every incentive to stall on the next nominee, to make sure that nominee is not confirmed before Congress adjourns at Thanksgiving. The longer they stall, the longer Sandra Day O'Connor remains on the Supreme Court -- and she is their kind of judge, one who makes policy instead of applying the law.
Obstructionist Democrats in the Senate have had their hand strengthened by this episode. Even those who had their knives out for Harriet Miers can now piously lament her withdrawal and claim that, while they might have voted for her confirmation, they must now oppose an "extremist" nominee chosen in response to the conservative groups that forced Ms. Miers' withdrawal.
Any judicial nominee who has said that the Constitution means what it says, not what judges would like it to mean, is going to be called an "extremist." That person will be said to be "out of the mainstream." But the mainstream is itself the problem.
What is the point of electing a President pledged to appoint judges who are like Justices Scalia and Thomas, if the weakness of his own party's Senators leads him to appoint judges who are like Justices O'Connor and Kennedy or -- heaven help us -- David Souter?
If the Republican majority in the Senate cannot bring themselves to act like a majority, they may no longer be a majority if their base of support stops supporting them at the ballot box.
The brutal fact is that Senate Republicans have not had the stomach for a fight, either during this administration or during the Democratic administration under Clinton.
While Senate Democrats have not hesitated to obstruct the Senate from even voting on some of President Bush's nominees to appellate courts, Republicans gave an overwhelming vote of approval to even such a far left Clinton nominee as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
While it would have been wrong to obstruct the Senate from voting on Judge Ginsburg, there was no need for the Republicans to vote for her themselves. If they thought that such cooperation would be reciprocated when their party controlled the White House and the Senate, events have shown that they were sadly mistaken.
Democrats understand that they were elected to do what those who elected them wanted. But Republicans seem to think they were elected to make deals with Democrats and gain media applause for doing so.
Senate Democrats are a united minority, while Senate Republicans are a divided majority, with prima donnas and opportunists ready to leave their fellow Republicans in the lurch when a showdown comes -- even if that means risking the whole party's loss of support among voters who feel betrayed.
That is the hand that President Bush has been dealt.
Harriet Miers was his attempt to make the best of that weak hand. Now his conservative base, having rejected Ms. Miers, expects him to nominate someone with a clearly established track record of upholding the Constitution as it was written.
But does the Republican "majority" in the Senate have the guts for the battle that such a nomination would surely set off? Are they prepared to put up a fight and be satisfied with a victory on a close vote, with perhaps Vice President Cheney breaking a tie?
Or is looking "statesmanlike" in the liberal media more important to some Republican Senators, either for its ego boost or for its practical political value in running for re-election or for the Presidency in 2008?
Politically, these can be "times that try men's souls" -- for those who still have souls and haven't sold them.
Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate
What?
What good is a "majority" if the "majority" are RINOs?
Better a minority with spine than a majority without spine.
I hope many of you learned after the Miers episode that it is time for activists to fight for conservative causes, not for "majorities", since "majorities" today means RINOs.
Conservative voters elected a left leaning president in George Bush, and leftists like McCain, Dewine, Collins, Hagel, SnoweJob, Chafee, et al. The voters in this nation are far more conservative than the RINOs we elect. As such, we need to fight for our causes and STOP believing that the people we elect will do the fighting for us. It has been shown so many times that they will not fight for us, so we need to carry the fight ourselves.
True conservatives on Free Republic, Michelle Malkin, Charles Krauthammer, Ann Coulter, George Will, Peggy Noonan and a multitude of other conservative commentators put the Miers nomination by Bush in the dumpster, thank God. It was the "Consenus Bush" who selected her, and it would have been the RINO Republican Senators who would have confirmed her had we not saved the day.
Had it not been for true conservatives like some of us here on Free Republic and these national figures, we would have gotten another Souter-style justice likely.
Any conservative who puts faith into George Bush or the Republican Senate needs a reality check. The fight needs to be taken at the grassroots level until these RINOs start understanding that the voters are conservative and, hopefully, they then start acting like a conservative president and a conservative Senate.
We true conservatives need to take pride that we caused a major change in the USA with the quashing of Miers, but we need to do the same on other critical issues. Bush and the Republican'ts will not do it for us.
On any given day, I'm not sure who I despise more.
Read that, "the RINO contingent of the 'republican' party", with McRino one of the lead traitors.
And most importantly, the democrats would own the committee chairmanships and would schedule investigations (aka kangaroo courts) on every subject imaginable, from the war on terror to environmental policies to the UN funding. By the time they got done running those "investigations" on national television, conservatives would be viewed by the public as a combination of Simon Legree/Snidely Whiplash. This would almost certainly translate to a non-conservative getting the nomination in 2008, and possible the resultant loss of the White House.
Then we would have 4 years of retreat from AL Quaeda, kowtowing to the UN, selling off our secrets to China, etc. etc.
THAT is why it is important to have the majority.
I don't know, but it seems to me that Graham, being from conservative S.C., MUST have received a good number of "nasty-grams" from his constituents after the last go-round, which means he should be running scared enough to vote the right way this time.
Anyone from S.C. got the scoop on this guy?
Your assumption that similar personalities would be elected by state legislatures is questionable. Many, if not most, of those seeking senate seats today have narcissitic peronalities and would not fare well with state legislatures looking for team players.
Roger that
The idea that the two legislative bodies attract entirely distinct strata of aspiring officeholders is an inaccurate assumption.
goldstategop wrote:
Simple - if Republican Senators refuse to vote for the President's nominee, punish the party next year by stripping it of its Senate majority. If these Senators do not want to please their President and the voters who elected them, perhaps being in the minority will help to concentrate their minds.
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Simple.....lets cut off our nose to spite our face. Who are we punishing by allowing the other party to be elected?
("Denny Crane: Gun Control? For Communists. She's a liberal. Can't hunt.")
Listen up people...
goldstategop wrote:
We would be punishing GOP Senators for failure to support our President
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Wrong. We would be punishing ourselves by giving in to the Democrat pressure, and giving up on our party. The answer is to hold each republican senator responsible for his poor performance. Then during his election year actively work to replace him with a better qualified republican. If this happens even a few times it would send a powerful message to those who think they can get away with abandoning the people who elected them.
Have your ever heard the logical fallacy of the whole equals the sum of the parts?
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~govt/docs/Schiller.PDF
Obviously not. /grin
Gotta run, I'm late for church. I'll revisit this when I return.
Heh, it would be sumptuously ironic if we gave the Senate back to the Dems only to have the GOP filibuster anything and everything they try to do.
I suggest that you at least take the time to look at the document I've offered for your perusal.
It is edifying, especially for those of you who hew to this ridiculous-not to mention, unverifiable-conviction that repealing the 17th Amendment is some sort of panacea that will return the United States to its Constitutional roots.
If you actually want to roll back the insidious socialism that's gripped this country from 1932 onward, then I suggest that you find a more effective vehicle for accomplishing that goal, e.g. lobbying for the modification or eradication of the income tax, clamoring for the repeal of the disastrous congressional expansions to Medicare-and every other "entitlement" program under the Sun-and campaigning for the imposition of firm, low numerical quotas on the thousands of tax-eaters that are given carte blanche to enter this country on an annual basis.
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