Not with a bang, but a whimper?

January 31, 2006

I regret not having done more thorough coverage of the Senate “fight,” if we can call it that, over Samuel Alito’s Supreme Court nomination yesterday, but my heart just wasn’t in it. The writing’s been on the wall for, well, several months now, so yesterday’s theatrics just weren’t as captivating as they could have been.

For what it’s worth, the full breakdown of yesterday’s filibuster vote is online. (The 25 senators who backed the filibuster are the “no” votes.) And now that Alito is slated for confirmation, I see the past several days as a good-news, bad-news situation.

* The good news is two-dozen senators stepped up to mount aggressive opposition to Alito; the bad news is they did so in the 11th hour when it was too late.

* The good news is John Kerry showed great leadership; the bad news is it emerged while he was in Switzerland and came after the outcome of the Alito debate was largely over.

* The good news is 25 senators voted for the filibuster; the bad news is more than that voted to filibuster Bush’s energy bill.

* The good news is senators who want to be president (Bayh, Biden, Clinton, Feingold, and Kerry) voted for the filibuster; the bad news is several red-state incumbents who are up in November (Byrd, Conrad, Johnson, Nelson ) will vote to confirm.

* The good news is one Republican senator (Chafee) will vote against Alito; the bad news is he’ll likely be the only one.

* The good news is Alito will get far more than the 22 Dem “no” votes John Roberts got; the bad news is Alito will be on the high court anyway.

When Alito was nominated, it was supposed to set up the biggest judicial fight since Clarence Thomas. There’d be a massive ad campaign, rallies, fundraising, debates, the works. Obviously, The Dems never really crafted a coherent strategy, the holiday break wasn’t utilized, there were other issues on the front burner, and Alito is on his way.

Was this a disappointing result? Sure. Is it a disaster for the left? Well, as Digby explained very well, Dems may not have been able to defeat Alito, but this may turn out to be an eye-opening moment for the party and its activists.

I know it hurts to lose this one. I won’t say that I’m not disappointed. But it was a very long shot from the outset and we managed to make some noise and get ourselves heard. The idea that it is somehow a sign of weakness because we only got 25 members of the Senate, including the entire leadership, to vote to filibuster a Supreme Court nominee is funny to me. Two years ago I would have thought somebody was on crack if they even suggested it was possible.

In this sense, as frustrating as the Alito fight has been, what’s possible may be slowly changing. Something to keep in mind.

January 31, 2006 at 9:37 am

This is what we have been waiting for. After all, I am 25 years old. For my entire life, and thus the lives of my generation plus almost another decade, the Supreme Court has been relatively liberal. We don’t know it any other way. Roe v. Wade has always been, in our minds, long settled.

This understanding leads to complacency. Here’s hoping for some real scortching, rights-violating, Constitution-destroying decisions! Only that sort of activity can galvanize the liberals in the country into action at a high level.

On another plus side, I can’t wait to see the Republicans actually be called to account for their 30 years of promises to overturn Roe v. Wade. When a solid majority of the population isn’t comfortable with the government being in their bedroom anymore (which they aren’t), it is going to be a painful day for Republicans. But, in order to get that, we need to have this court start being the conservative beasts which they have promised to be…

And, on the other hand, if Scalito and Roberts turn out to be more moderate than promised, we still win, anyway…

Don’t forget – Alito was the second choice.

A few related thoughts:

If there ever was a time when principle should matter more than politics, it’s when the Senate is choosing a Supreme Court member.

For the first time in its history the Supreme Court has a majority of Roman Catholics; Scalia and Thomas are extremists (Opus Dei, Latin mass, etc.). How many will do Rome’s bidding when it comes to cases Rome cares about?

Why do Senators, Republican and Democrat, make me think of big, fat hogs wallowing in filth (including their own)? They’ll do anything so long as they run no risk of being cut from trough.

I know analogies aren’t always exact (e.g., Senators are lazier and filthier than pigs), but if you want a defining moment for our transition into fascism, yesterday’s failed vote by the Democratic Senators would be it.

I must say that I’m disgusted by the rah-rah boosterism of many liberal bloggers, not to mention the Glenn Reynolds/Jeff Jarvis-worthy megalomania about how blogs have finally arrived. The Dems clearly dropped the ball on the Alito nomination, and Kerry’s last-minute gambit was the worst type of craven, opportunistic pandering (not that there’s a “best”). Instead of calling bulls**t on Kerry and his feckless crew, liberal bloggers ate it up in Pavlovian fashion, leading to all the “call your Senator NOW!” exhortations of the past few days.
But what I find most disturbing about this sordid affair is that the liberal blogosphere is slowly but inexorably turning into the equivalent of the Religious Right. We frequently smirk about how Republican leaders like Frist cynically whip their religious conservative shock troops into a frothing rage come election time, only to disappoint them again and again. But the fact that so many liberal bloggers gleefully jumped at Kerry’s cynical bait, when the game was already over, leads me to believe that many liberals, including some bloggers for whom I have tremendous respect, are heading down this same sordid path. Let’s hope not.

So does this mean that when people get sick of the rights being eroded away, that when the courts swing back the other way it will be ok because it will be what the people want since this is what they want right now right? I can’t stand the notion that one group of people can always put restrictions on another, abortions are not going to stop, people will always do what they wanna do. Look how dangerous it is to do drugs in America, I am not saying that we should legalize all drugs, but people die due to this unregualtion, which will be the case when all this Roe business gets settled their way. Lets see how much they like it when daddy’s little angel gets permently scared or dies, because she made a mistake, and couldn’t live with it, but with no safe way, hey! Lets roll the dice, my daughter is dead but thank God she couldn’t get a legal abortion.

A sort of wheezy shot at a filibuster was better than a shrug of the shoulders and a slouching shuffle away from the scene…again. I wrote my senator’s Boxer and Feinstein, and I wrote to Reid thanking them for their votes. The whole thing was a glimmer of confidence and an indication of a little bit of soul searching.

The Democrats lost this when the Senators on the Judicary Committee decided the whole point of the Alito hearing was to let America hear them talk.

What – a – waste – of – time.

“my daughter is dead but thank God she couldn’t get a legal abortion.”

For some conservatives, mostly religious ones, that is what it is all about. As long as Abortion is recognized as legal in this country, they think they are going to hell. Once it is illegal, no matter how easy it is to obtain, they are free and clear because their moral outrage is codified into law and they can now go to heaven.

If they cared, really cared about reducing abortions in this country, they would focus on family support, day care and tax incentives for children. They would also support reducing unwanted pregnacies. But condom use is just as sinful as abortion to them, so they are against real sex-education (Abstinence education has a 50% failure rate) and condom distributions.

They oppose all decrimilization of homosexuality and other forms of sodomy (oral sex is sodomy, folks) because to NOT have these acts regarded as criminal endangers THEIR mortal souls. They oppose the teaching of evolution in schools not because they don’t know its correct, but because they can’t teach bibical literalism along side of evolution, and thus they feel they are failing in their duty to preach Christianity.

Simply, this is the belief that the Sinful (by their lights) should be the Criminal. Rather then bother to preach avoidance of sin, they just want to threaten to lock the sinners up.

This is basically laziness. The belief that Government should do your work for you. Televangilists sit in their studios, Mega-Church preachers work one day a week. No one goes out to the poor and the desperate and provides pastoral support. Why should they bother? It is far cheaper to spend one cent on the dollar to convince the Government to do their work for them, then sit back and live in luxury, convinced that when the Rapture comes, they get a free pass around the DYING every other human being since the beginning of our species has had to do to get to the afterlife, all the while forgetting Jesus’s admission that “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle then it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”

That would be Jesus’ admonition

Damn, I can’t spell hard words. I need to practice my vocabulary

You know, I haven’t heard phrases like “Rome’s bidding” since Kennedy ran for president (see Ed Stephen’s quote above).

Let’s review reality, the American College of Catholic Bishops has pretty much stood alone amoung religious groups in both objecting to human trafficing and abuses in Saipan and in objecting to the GOP’s draconian budget.

Catholic charities remains the single largest source of food, clothing, housing, and general aid to our nation’s poor. Unlike some other faiths, the service to the poor is, itself, seen as the duty. That is why Catholic groups were able to utilize Federal dollars before the president’ s absurd faith-based-waste initiative – ie, the groups felt that handing out the food was important enough to warrent putting away the crosses.

We could quibble semantics, after all, splinter groups that reject Vatican II reforms are, by their acts, stating that they are not part of the Roman Catholic Church. But why bother?

Religious affiliation has nothing to do with it. The problem isn’t being Catholic, the problem is being narrow minded, imperial, self absorbed pricks – who lack the moral fiber to even pretend to be legally consistant in their decisions. Blaming a religion would be like saying Thomas is a disaster of a juror because he is black.

Again, the melatonin in his skin has nothing to do with it. The man has the intellectual curiousity of a Tic Tac, is essentially illiteriate, and, well, a dickhead.

Creating religious divisions in the Democratic caucus is pointless. What we should really be focusing on is either winning back the Senate, or just winning the White House. After all, the GOP is currently arguing that it would be perfectly legal for a President to round up all those puss faced lying sacks of shit I see on Fox news (who aided and abetted Karl Rove, outter of CIA operataives), beat the shit out of them with broom handles, then take pictures of them dancing around naked at Gitmo…

Yes, even thinking about the above is sin, but I’m not just Catholic, I’m human…

-jjf

Steve,

I appreciate your analysis, but I expect better from you. In particular, I find this swipe at Kerry to be uninformed and without context:

“The good news is John Kerry showed great leadership; the bad news is it emerged while he was in Switzerland and came after the outcome of the Alito debate was largely over.”

First, as to specifics, read this:

http://upper-left.blogspot.com/2006_01_29_upper-left_archive.html#113863825438373797

Second, Kerry promised to do just this (filibuster) going back as far as I can remember. This is a Dem who said what he was going to do, and did what he said he was going to do, and he’s to be faulted for it? Why? Because he didn’t win? Because he didn’t do it the right way? What’s the right way?

Third, in damning Kerry, how many Dems are you implicitly letting off the hook? If I was going to be pointing fingers I’d point a great big middle finger at Byrd for selling out the very issues that he has been harping on for the past fifty years. In supporting Alito Byrd himself did as much to undercut Congress’s authority as anyone, and he knows it. This is the kind of hypocrisy that kills the Democratc Party, yet no one is kicking Byrd’s ass because he’s an old man.

Kerry stepped up. End of story. And props to Ted, too.

This has been said before, but might be worth reiterating here.

In the long run, I’m not sure that it isn’t good for Democrats and for the country that we’ve “lost” (or are losing) the Supreme Court.

Since the heyday of the Warren Court, I believe liberals have become lazy about articulating our principles and really advocating for our beliefs. We had the law on our side, and that was that. Roe is the ultimate example of this: at least in my conscious lifetime (I’m 32), liberals with very few exceptions have never made the case for reproductive choice. We’ve just lined up to defend the law.

This essentially defensive position has given away the game and stultified the process of idea generation, on both philosophical and operational levels, that’s necessary for successful politics. While I certainly would never have chosen to elevate a corporate enabler and advocate of executive dictatorship like Alito to the high court, maybe the existential threat he arguably represents will be the final kick to our complacency.

Yeah, Kerry was in Switzerland, and at “a five-star hotel” according to Bush’s designated gerbil. Scott McClellan. Of course such a remark from Scott is not to be construed as “class warfare.” That’s reserved for Democrats, who also “hate America” and “blame America first.”

Fitz,

I haven’t heard/read the phrase “Rome’s bidding” since I actually heard/read it all the time growing up in Central California as a teenager in the ’50s. I can’t tell you the number of crudely drawn cartoons showing a fat, triple-tiara-ed pig of a Pope rising out the Vatican and pulling puppet strings on American politicians. They were distributed by the Republicans and the Masons in the cow town where I grew up, Paso Robles – this was before the place became famous for wines; it was literally beef cattle and wheat, little more. The message was clear: if a Catholic becomes president, Rome will start telling us what to do.

As one who grew up in a Catholic family, one of the few in that town then, I resented all that. Incidentally, our newly arrived pastor was greeted by a burning cross on the church lawn. I spent three teenage years in a Franciscan seminary. Though I had left the Church behind me by the 1960 elections (I was going to college in San Francisco) I was pleased as punch to see Kennedy slam the Southern Baptists and Roman Catholic Bishops during his campaign. He said, clearly and emphatically, that he would govern as an American, not a Roman Catholic toadie And he did. And so did all Catholics did after that.

Now, recently, during the reign of the Regal Moron, the Church in Rome has in fact been telling American Catholics how to vote, threatening excommunication over things like abortion and death with dignity, threatening to withhold communion from certain Democrats. They’re against abortion and death with dignity; they’re also (fruitlessly) against capital punishment and the Iraq war; they wasted decades covering up priestly pederasty. I know they’ve done much good, but to be honest: they’ve had a highly mixed record. And the fact is it isn’t just Americans Catholics messing in our politics; it is the Vatican.

I take issue with your saying the religion of a Supreme Court member is no more relevant than his skin color. Religion (Roman Catholicism anyway) involves beliefs, value judgments. Justice Kennedy, like President Kennedy, tries to keep his personal beliefs out of governance. The others seem, to me, strictly bound by their beliefs — which the vast majority of the nation don’t share, according to many polls reported in The Carpetbagger Report.

Comments are closed.