The Chronicle editors are not happy campers. This whole media effort to unseat President Bush didn’t turn out well, and that fact is settling in:
Specter, who supports a woman’s right to choose abortion, is in line to become chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Anti-abortion activists who supported President Bush’s bid for re-election are demanding that Specter be barred from the chairmanship.
Although Republican senators thwarted many of President Bill Clinton’s judicial nominations, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist is incensed at Democratic filibusters that have kept a few of Bush’s nominees off the appeals courts. Frist’s frustration is evident in his threat to change the rule allowing 41 senators to prevent a bill or nomination from coming up for a final vote.
Meanwhile, outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft criticized federal judges who refuse to exempt the Bush administration from laws and treaties outlawing inhumane treatment and imprisonment without charge or counsel. Ashcroft accused the judges of jeopardizing national security.
The Constitution, with its checks and balances, was expressly designed to keep such blanket exemptions from happening. The Senate rule requiring 60 votes to close debate has the same purpose and effect. These restrictions are frustrating to politicians eager for change. To date, however, the nation has suffered less harm from the checks and balances than it would suffer without them.
Andrew McCarthy of NRO has some thoughts on this issue of judges:
Nationally, Democrats are in the thrall of trial lawyers, civil-liberties activists, and the pro-choice lobby. These interest groups are no dummies — they fully appreciate that much of what they want to bring about as policy (e.g., abortion-on-demand, affirmative action, according constitutional protections to foreign enemy combatants) is unpopular with voters, while much of what is popular with voters (e.g., tort-reform) is anathema to them. They are reliant on activist judges willing to stretch the Constitution as a sheath that gives their preferences the cover of “fundamental law,” insulating them from challenge at the ballot box. For them, then, there is no issue in national politics more crucial than the composition of the federal bench. It is, bluntly, the whole ballgame.
Does anyone think that if John Kerry had won the election, he wouldn’t have nominated judges that followed his lines of thinking? The American people sent a message by reelecting President Bush and increasing the Republican majorities in the House and the Senate, and one issue (of many) was judicial appointments. The editors obviously aren’t happy about it, but they’re clearly not in the mainstream these days.
