Republican Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee plotting war strategy with his 4-Star generals – judicial nominees Judge Janice Rogers Brown (center) and Judge Priscilla R. Owen
On Wednesday, the US Senate began debate on two of President Bush’s most beleaguered nominations to the Federal Court of Appeals. Unfortunately, these nominees are merely scapegoats in a political war between Democrats who caricature them as judicial jihadists determined to curtail American liberties and Republicans who deify them as latter-day Joans of Arc crusading to enforce strict adherence to their version of America’s Judeo Christian tradition.
But not since the debate on prohibition has political discourse been so patently contrived and self-righteous. After all, neither Democrats nor Republicans even bother to pretend that this debate has anything to do with the qualifications of these female jurists to serve on the bench. Instead, advocates for each side declaim that this fight is to protect and preserve the American way of life – as if they are the last line of defense against the imminent invasion of alien forces.
Moreover, notwithstanding Afghanistan and Iraq, talk of “exercising the nuclear option” and other life and death rhetoric imply that what is at stake in this debate makes the casualties of those wars seem trivial. And, no one understands this perverse juxtaposition more than that right-wing zealot – Patrick J. Buchanan. After all, like a true prophet, he foretold of this war in his infamous Republican National Convention speech in 1992. Back then he warned of a cultural war in which Democrats were seeking to impose on America:
“…abortion on demand, a litmus test for the Supreme Court, homosexual rights, discrimination against religious schools, women in combat [and such values that cannot be tolerated] in a nation that we still call God’s country.
There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”
Clearly, both sides have decided that the best way to capture souls is to stack the courts with activist Judges who share their political ideology. In fact, liberal Democrats engaged in this judicial gerrymandering during President Clinton’s 8 years in the White House, and now conservative Republicans are using George Bush’s presidency to do the same.
That’s it folks: petty partisan politics posturing as principled warfare….A pox on both their houses!
Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada holding a pep rally on the steps of the capitol building at which he announced new recruits numbering over 1 million who are eager to proselytize the liberal cause…
If the performance of the Court changes, it is to be hoped that liberal revisionism will not be replaced by conservative revisionism. The two are equally illegitimate. The Constitution is too important to our national well-being and to our liberties to be made into a political weapon. Departure from its actual principles, whether in Dred Scott, Lochner, or Roe, is inconsistent with the maintenance of constitutional democracy.
[From The Tempting of America: The Political Seduction of the Law by Judge Robert Bork.]
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