The Black Republican

In a column that sounds more appropriate for a member of MoveOn.org than a Senior Editor for a national newsweekly, Jonathan Alter last week proved how absolutely unhinged the leftist press has become. In a world of so many real threats, Alter is worrying that George Bush is the new Nixon.

With a few exceptions, the media coverage [of the Alito hearings] didn't help. It's so much easier to talk about Joe Biden's big mouth or a right-wing Princeton alumni group or Mrs. Alito's tears than to figure out how the country should prevent a president of the United States from castrating the United States Congress.

I suppose this could be considered progress. The moonbats have been saying for years that Bush is Hitler, and Alter's own column draws imagery that suggests the Chimpführer is just days away from burning down the Reichstag Capitol.

The "momentous" issue (Alito's words) is whether this president, or any other, has the right to tell Congress to shove it. And even if one concedes that wartime offers the president extra powers to limit liberty, what happens if the terrorist threat looks permanent? We may be scrapping our checks and balances not just for a few years (as during the Civil War), but for good.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Russ Feingold ably raised some of these questions last week; Al Gore... weigh(ed) in, too. But the Democratic Party as a whole cannot stay focused on the issue. Some activists keep jumping ahead to the remedy for the president's power grab, which they say is impeachment. But that's a pipe dream and a distraction from the task at hand, which is figuring out how to reassert Congress's institutional role.

Jonathan, Congress's institutional role in a judicial nomination is laid out in the Constitution itself; specifically, the Senate is to "advise and consent." So tomorrow, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Judge Alito's nomination to be the next Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

What did the Senate's exhaustive grilling of the judge turn up? Not much, primarily because - rather than asking a wide range of probing questions regarding Alito's judicial interpretation of his 300 decisions over 15 years on the federal bench - the Democrats were obsessed with playing "Gotcha!" games, asking the same three or four questions over and over again. Judge Alito, not being a fool, obliged in kind with the same three or four answers - over and over again.

For those on the liberal side who tremble with rage over the obstinate refusal of the good judge to say what his opinions are on the legal issues of the day, consider what The Black Republican had to say about judicial nominations, via the late Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist:

We wish for a... Justice who will sustain what has been done in regard to emancipation.... We cannot ask a man what he will do, and if we should, and he should answer us, we should despise him for it. Therefore, we must take a man whose opinions are known.

Of course, the significant difference here is Lincoln was looking for someone to put ON the court, while Democrats are scrambling for a reason to keep one OFF. Yet it's instructive - about the level of the Democrats' hypocrisy, and Alter's paranoia - that Rehnquist, himself a justice and a chief justice, saw nothing improper about a president sending a nominee to the court that he hopes will defend his interests.

There is no reason in the world why a president should not do this. One of the many marks of genius that our Constitution bears is the fine balance struck in the establishment of the judicial branch, avoiding subservience to the supposedly more vigorous legislative and executive branches on the one hand, and avoiding total institutional isolation from public opinion on the other. The performance of the judicial branch of the United States government for a period of nearly two hundred years has shown it to be remarkably independent of the other coordinate branches of that government. Yet the institution has been constructed in such a way that, because of the mortality tables, if nothing else, the public will, in the person of the President of the United States - the one official who is elected by the entire nation - have something to say about the membership of the Court, and thereby indirectly about its decisions.

If the Democrats think it's so terrible the Constitution could be shredded by a conservative court, why are they in such a rush to shred it first? Their defiance of the wisdom of the Founders indicts them at every turn.