Looking Back On The Freak Show

I’ve not commented much on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and subsequent confirmation hearings. Primarily, I’ve avoided it as simple partisan wrangling. In addition, the best blogs of both sides have done very well explaining and covering the goings on. Now that the theatrics and the aborted filibuster have run their course, though, I thought it worth at least a minor retrospective.

Such a process as confirmation to the Supreme Court until recently had never been one for much fanfare. It was assumed that if a President won an election, it was his prerogative to choose nominees in line with his political philosophy. With the exception of Robert Bork, who was too outspoken about how much he agreed with Reagan, and ole’ Abe Fortas who was too much of an LBJ crony, the Harriet Meyers of the 60’s if you will, modern history has pretty much made confirmation of candidates a matter of course. If the candidate was qualified and regarded highly by his or her colleagues, they were confirmed regardless of their legal position, and we’ve gotten some real disasters because of it.

Even so, the hostility and partisan rancor in the Alito hearings by far and away stood out as setting a new and very sad precedent for future confirmations. One can hardly expect that Republicans will be as easy going with Democratic nominees in the future based on what they’ve had to put up with in the Roberts and Alito hearings. It doesn’t make it right or better, but even a blind man should be able to see that the Left will have a hard time moving replacement social engineers onto the Court.

In comparison to the confirmation of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, arguably the most leftist judge on the course, the Alito hearings were reminiscent of an Inquisition. Audio from the Ginsburg hearings shows she answered very few questions and that Republicans asking those questions were generally polite and accommodating. In contrast, Kennedy was reduced to reading satire and receiving verbal queues from his fellow Democrat Senators when the klinking ice got too loud for him to finish his own thoughts to attempt to discredit Alito. I was expecting any minute for the Democrats to produce someone that Alito had given a wedgie to in third grade or even trot out the old warhorse Anita Hill saying that Clarence Thomas had once mentioned Alito’s name before putting some foreign hair on her Coke. In the interest of brevity and perhaps because the Republicans were running the hearings this time, we were spared that.

The attempted filibuster and extreme change in how Senators have been voting for recent nominees, almost along party lines, goes to show just what they think, or more appropriately what their special interest handlers think of this nomination process.

The Supreme Court has become the instrument of social change for the Left. An agenda they cannot get through voters or legislatures finds a warm and welcoming home among the liberal majority on the Court. Not that the Court has been a saintly body before, but after the New Deal, appointees have increasingly come from the left side of the fence. That this may be swinging back the other way has rightly caused panic among those who wish to change us for their sake through judicial fiat. And it may also be looked at as a positive sign by those who long for a return to less government control and more individual liberty and responsibility. While it by no means signals complete victory, at the very least it is a battle long anticipated that potentially we have won as libertarians and conservatives. With luck, perhaps more will follow.