Some of you folks are the most negative people I know -- the President could nominate the most strict Constitutionalist and some of you are going to be wringing your hands. Why let Pres Bush's record of judicial nominations get in the way of "what could happen?"
All this social conservatives will leave is crap -- always the threats around here when there are no facts to back up a supposition. Disgusting!
You just got through posting to someone who said he DOESN'T EXPECT BUSH TO DISAPPOINT HIM. Hence, he was not being negative. What is it with the paranoia that you and a few others have been showing on this thread?
I have said twice that I expect the President's nominee to be solid. Bush has a good judicial track record.
But if he doesn't pick a conservative ... just wait and see what happens.
I have to disagree, the reason we got 8 years of slick willie is because social conservatives voted for Perot or stayed home. I hope this will not happen again,but it could. All you have to do is read one thread to note the Buchanan reactionaries coming out in droves. Most Conservatives will not go off the reservation because they are not one issue voters,but there are enough one issue people to screw up the whole thing. They will not only shoot themselves in the foot,they will shoot us in both feet.
I get personally annoyed (I must be growing older which, I suppose, generally beats the alternative) by suggestions that, as a social conservative, I am somehow inclined to leave the GOP unless I get everything I want the instant that I want it. Roe vs. Wade was handed down more than thirty years ago. Lately, there have been a spate of pro-homosexual decisions. I don't think I vary one iota in my beliefs and positions on such matters from your Senator Coburn and Senator Inhofe and former Senator Nickles (sp.?) on any social issue. Or from J. C. Watts for that matter or from Steve Largent. What am I, as a social conservative, doing to deserve disrespect?
Though my every ancestor was a Democrat (and most were labor union members), I have been a Republican since I was a teenager and I will die one. Most of my relatives (still working class have adhered to the GOP for socially conservative Catholic religious reasons. I have supported Dubya since he was nominated and supported him on just about every issue including the tax cuts which benefit me not at all. Those tax cuts were good policy regardless of who they benefit. Likewise Dubya's policies in most areas.
If you want to find folks who constantly threaten to bolt, you would do better to look at the Tancredo crowd.
Your suggestion of Janice Rogers Brown for the vacancy is something in which I thoroughly concur. She is the single best nominee that I can imagine. That is particularly true in light of the Kelo vs. New London decision. The GOP is changing as a socio-political institution but the party is still defined by its ideology.
The Demonrats are frantic because they cannot take Janice Rogers Brown, Clarence Thomas, Alberto Gonzales (whatever his issue drawbacks) for granted simply because of their respective ancestries. The Demonrats would like the right to convert the Republican young in college classrooms on environmentalism, sexual license, bleeding heartism, pseudo-intellectual mock superiority, repulsion for war and (gasp!) guns, etc. Meanwhile, the Demonrats view the votes of blacks, Hispanics, union members, poor people, blue collars, dead people, people who never were, etc. as a sort of political entitlement for Demonrats. I'll bet you disagree with this as much as I do.
For what it is worth, I also agree with you on Dubya's judicial nominations which are generally far better than those of his father or even of Ronaldus Maximus.
The Constitution Party types or other eccentrics have seldom effected an election outcome. The phenomenon of social conservatives is far, far broader than the Constitution Party types. The fact missing in the notion that social conservatives will leave the GOP is any sizeable number of actual social conservatives who WILL leave the GOP in any foreseeable circumstance.
That does not mean that social conservatives expect to be or wish to be taken for granted. It is for such circumstances that God invented primaries. How much did Tom Coburn spend running for his three terms in Congress in an otherwise Democrat district? How much did he spend compared to his primary opponent(s) in the Senate race?
Oh, and few things put social conservatives in more of a punishing mood than the Gerald Fordian/Nelson Rockefellerian suggestion that they "have no place else to go." If they go elsewhere in this election or that they will do so by quiet nonviolent political assassination by voting booth rather than public proclamation and press release except when we got Weicker's hide in Connecticut. Lieberman is still more of a Republican than Weicker ever was.