{"id":5689,"date":"2005-10-31T08:51:21","date_gmt":"2005-10-31T13:51:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5689"},"modified":"2005-10-31T08:51:21","modified_gmt":"2005-10-31T13:51:21","slug":"crossing-a-name-off-their-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/crossing-a-name-off-their-list\/","title":{"rendered":"Crossing a name off their list"},"content":{"rendered":"

In May, before there was even a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the White House began reaching out to far-right activists to ask who they’d like to see nominated. The Christian Legal Society, one of the groups “solicited” for their views and recommendations. The Washington Times reported<\/a> that the group wrote a short list of just six names. Samuel Alito was near the top.<\/p>\n

A month later, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family published a short list<\/a>, which was distributed to the group’s membership. Two of the top three names were John Roberts and Sam Alito.<\/p>\n

In other words, Bush hasn’t merely nominated a conservative jurist; he’s asked right-wing conservative activists for their wish lists — and then used them as a guide.<\/p>\n

It’s almost sad to see a president so fearful of angering his political supporters that he practically has to let his base make his Supreme Court nomination for him. A few weeks ago, Bush had the nerve to make up his own mind<\/a> on filling a high court vacancy, which his supporters didn’t seem to care for. Now the president seems to have given up on the pretense of being a “uniter” altogether, completely surrendering to the demands of his political base.<\/p>\n

After Harriet Miers’ nomination was pulled last week, Tony Fabrizio, a prominent Republican pollster, said<\/a> the conservative movement is “only going to be emboldened by getting Harriet Miers’ scalp. They stared down the White House and won.”<\/p>\n

And to the victor go the spoils.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In May, before there was even a vacancy on the Supreme Court, the White House began reaching out to far-right activists to ask who they’d like to see nominated. The Christian Legal Society, one of the groups “solicited” for their views and recommendations. The Washington Times reported that the group wrote a short list of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5689","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5689\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}