The Alito hearings begin – Betsy has some thoughts and links about Judge Alito, including the universal opinion of his colleagues that he’s a brilliant, hard-working justice. It’s pretty clear that the Democrats will throw all decorum out the window during the hearings and attack Alito for his political philosophy instead of his jurisprudence. If this is the new threshold for justices, ACLU lawyer Ruth Bader Ginsberg never would have received 90+ votes for confirmation from the Senate.
The old standard used to be that the President, elected by the people, had the Constitutional power to shape the judiciary. The new rule is that deference is still paid to the chief executive…if he’s a Democrat.
2 comments:
Actually, one could argue that the Democratic Party has always been that way. They supported Vietnam until Nixon replaced LBJ. Their support of the Civil War and Lincoln was weak. They were mostly against the first Gulf War. WWI and WWII would have seen the same trend except that Dem's were President throughout both conflicts.
And I'm wondering if the same trend occurred when Ike replace Truman over the Korean War.
Excellent and insightful points! The Democratic and Republican parties in 1862 are the ideological equivalent of today's. A war is the same as a judicial confirmation. The Democrats "supported Vietnam until Nixon replaced LBJ"... hmm, and why didn't Nixon have Lyndon Johnson as his opponent, anyway? Meanwhile, as Viking Pundit reminds us, the GOP hasn't made a strategic habit of blocking and contesting judges nominated by Democratic Presidents in living memory. (We're all 3 years old here, right? Great, then it works.) And as DebateGuy intelligently points out, only liberals exhibit self-interest or hypocrisy in politics.
Is it a rule that one must use their right hand for these circle jerks?
Post a Comment