The Senate GOP is united behind Roberts, isn’t it?

Part of the Dems’ problem with taking on John Roberts’ Supreme Court nomination is basic arithmetic. We have 45 seats, the Republicans have 55. Even if the Dem caucus was united in opposition (and it’s not) to Roberts, Dems would also need six Republicans to break party ranks. Since no reasonable person believes that’s possible, discussion has shifted away from whether he’ll be confirmed to how big the margin will be.

Indeed, in this context, there are ample questions about how various Dems will react. Will centrist Dems up for re-election be extra supportive (Conrad, both Nelsons)? Will presidential aspirants take a hard line against Roberts (Clinton, Bayh, Feingold)?

But there’s another side to this that’s gone largely unmentioned. What about the endangered species of Capitol Hill — the moderate Republicans? Roll Call reported today that their votes are not a foregone conclusion.

Senate Republicans who support abortion rights are walking a fine line on the question of whether to support John Roberts’ nomination to the Supreme Court.

Centrist Republican Senators are caught between their desire to keep abortion legal in the United States — a goal that could be hampered if Roberts is as willing to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision as some of his supporters believe he is — and loyalty to their party.

While many left-leaning abortion-rights groups instantly came out against Roberts, many Republican abortion-rights supporters, such as Sens. Olympia Snowe (Maine) and Lincoln Chafee (R.I.), have been quietly consulting with GOP abortion-rights groups and weighing how much to support Democrats in their quest to secure the release of documents relating to Roberts’ tenure in the solicitor general’s office of the first Bush administration.

“I’ve talked with several groups, and they’ll be sharing information with me,” Snowe said. “They’re examining his record, looking at some of the cases.”

I appreciate their hesitation. To their credit, these handful of moderates have not embraced Roberts’ nomination publicly and seem to have some appreciation for the fact that he disagrees with them on many critical legal issues.

But, really, when was the last time these moderates didn’t cave to party pressure on a nomination? When Janice Rogers Brown — who, for my money, remains the single worst of Bush’s nominees — came to the floor, not even one Republican voted against her. Not Snowe, not Collins, not Chafee, not Specter.

These guys are saying the right things now, promising a thorough review, backing Dem requests for more document production, thinking twice before backing a nominee that will vote to undo so much of what they claim to care about. But in the end, I suspect, they’ll fold. They always do.

Republican Majority for Choice suggests otherwise.

“If there was something much more revealing about his position [on Roe], I think he could be in jeopardy. There is a strong group of Republicans that do not want to see Roe v. Wade overturned,” [Jennifer Stockman, national co-chairwoman of the Republican Majority for Choice] said. “If it became apparent that he wants so-called life issues to go back to the states, I do think that would cause an uproar” with centrist Republicans.

That’s why the Republican Majority for Choice supports efforts, primarily by Senate Democrats, to get the White House to release Roberts’ papers from the first Bush administration, Stockman said.

“We’re trying to get as much information as possible,” she said.

Question for moderates: what will you do with this information once you see it?

yam nailed it. These guys are even more pathetic than Lieberman, if you can believe that. With Bush giving Bolton his back door pass to the U.N., you just have to weep in frustration over the reports yesterday that, in light of Bolton’s lie to the Senate about whether he was interviewed by an Inspector General, Chafee says that NOW, finally, he is ready to vote against Bolton. Well, dumbshit, that dog won’t hunt, as you Sen. Chafee, fucked up royally when the game was on the line; you choked when you could have at least swung at the pitch — and you don’t get a “do over.”

Sorry, Eadie, but I just have to say this: Jesus Fucking Christ, where the hell is this idiot Chafee’s brain? We all know his spine is gone; we could see him literally tying to hide under the table during the FRC debates. What a crying shame, when this disasterous nomination could have and should have been killed in the Committee, Chafee yapped his “little puppy dog yap” instead of standing up and shooting the nomination down.

The same goes for the worthless Lugar, who couldn’t tell Bush to go to hell on this awful man; for Hagel, who fancies himself a Presidential candidate in ’08, but can’t tell Bush to shove this awful nomination; and for DeWine, and Murkowski, and Sununu, and all of the other Rethug whores on the FRC who value party over anything and everything else, even to the point of blowing up the Senate as a co-equal branch of government, blowing up the United Nations as the only common denominator the world has to seek peaceful resolution of serious disagreements, and blowing up the rest of the world that both fears the U.S. and loathes its leader.

Shame on all of us for not rioting in the streets and demanding honest elections, like the brave Ukrainians did, and so many others have, too. We lie down and take the Diebold shit, the Katherine Harris and Ken Blackwell shenanigans as Secretaries of State, and all of the voter intimidation that prevents millions of Americans from voting and having their votes counted. Instead, those of us who believe that fraud occurred in Ohio and elsewhere are labeled as conspiracy theorists, lunatics, or just plain pains in the ass. Why? So we can lay down while Bush and the Rethugs take everything away that we have accomplished in this country since the Great Depression?

Too many Dems say, “Just be quiet, don’t rock the vote, yada, yada, yada.” Not surprisingly, I say, “Horseshit.” It’s time to get angry, to stop liars like Schmidt in OH-02, who mimes Bush’s talking points, denies every bit of corruption she has engaged in and allowed to occur in Ohio, to slime an Iraq vet, just to carry on the same “politics as usual”?

No. No more. NO FUCKING MORE!