There is some irony in the new White House line of attack against its critics. As opposition to Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination picks up, top Bush aides — including Ed Gillespie and Laura Bush — have thrown around the “sexism” charge. The fact that it’s not true seems to be irrelevant.
As Jonathan Chait explained today, the right should have seen this coming. Republicans have been making equally specious arguments against Dems for the past several years.
…Republicans have insisted the Democrats must be motivated by bigotry. Sometimes this argument has been subtle. (“I would hope that today the filibuster would not be used to deny an up-or-down vote on Janice Rogers Brown, because every parent deserves to dream for every child that they’ll have a chance,” argued one GOP senator.) Other times it has been more crude. (“Why are they afraid to put a black woman on the court?” asked one conservative black minister at an event with Senate Republican leader Bill Frist.)
Here’s another example. Republicans widely insinuated that Democratic opposition to the nomination of Miguel Estrada as a federal appellate judge was racist. Trent Lott — Trent Lott!, the man who was forced to step down as majority leader because he praised the segregationist candidacy of Strom Thurmond! — asserted, “They don’t want Miguel Estrada because he’s Hispanic.”
When Democrats opposed Priscilla Owen, another very conservative nominee, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft blustered, “Senate Democrats have indicated an unfortunate trend toward unfairness against qualified women nominated by this administration.” When Democrats opposed the nomination of extremely conservative Alabama Atty. Gen. William Pryor, Republicans insisted it was because Pryor is Catholic. (Democrats said they didn’t even know Pryor is Catholic until a Republican brought it up in hearings.) The Committee for Justice, a group linked to the White House, ran TV advertisements portraying a locked courthouse with the sign, “Catholics need not apply.”
And even if a Bush nominee is not black, Latino, female or Catholic, that doesn’t get Democrats off the hook. “It’s not just Catholics,” a Committee for Justice spokesman put it. “I think there’s an element of the far left of the Democratic Party that sees as its project scrubbing the public square of religion, and in some cases not only religion but of religious people.” So any opposition to any Bush nominee — except, I suppose, white male atheists — will be swiftly smeared as the work of bigots.
There’s no point in even dignifying the charges against Dems with a response — the attacks were just too stupid, even for the right. Yet, the fact that conservatives are now getting the same treatment as the left simply means that the Bush White House is largely unconcerned about who gets in their way, focusing instead on whether someone gets in their way.
For the Bush gang, if that means smearing like-minded allies with trumped-up attacks, so be it.