Liberals blamed the White House for Miguel Estrada failure to be confirmed (My Title)

Talon News ^ | 09/08/03 | Paul M. Weyrich

[bedolido]

I give the liberals in the Senate a lot of credit. They win first prize for the greatest amount of gall displayed in the 108th Congress. Following the withdrawal of Miguel Estrada as an appeals court nominee, liberals blamed the White House for his failure to be confirmed. They led the filibuster to block Estrada's elevation to the bench and so - according to their way of thinking - it is the fault of the White House that he withdrew.

The justification for this absurdity is as follows: Estrada worked in the Justice Department. The liberals on the Judiciary Committee demanded that Estrada's internal working papers be turned over to them. The White House refused. Every Solicitor General, going back to LBJ, wrote a letter to the Committee saying that turning over internal working papers would set an unacceptable precedent undermining the concept of separation of powers. Mind you, Democrats who worked for both Presidents Clinton and Carter, as well as those from Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Bush '41, all agreed that what the minority on the Judiciary Committee was asking for was improper.

If the White House had given in, Estrada still would not have been confirmed. The liberals would then have seized on one argument or other that Estrada raised while considering cases in the Justice Department as proof that he was an extremist and out of the mainstream. The White House was absolutely correct in not turning over the papers.

The White House is not responsible for Estrada not being confirmed.

So who is? I'll tell you who is, in my judgment. It is the Republican Senators, both liberals and conservatives, who didn't want judges to be an issue.

All sorts of pundits will now blame Majority Leader Bill Frist. Frist is not the culprit. A Majority Leader can only go so far when he is bucking his own conference. I am here to tell you that Frist wanted to make judges a front and center issue. His colleagues of all philosophical stripes said "forget it." He strung out the battle as long as he could, but in the end he gave in to his colleagues.

And why don't these Republican Senators want this to be a centerpiece issue? The Liberals don't want it because they really don't agree with Bush's selections of judicial nominees. They feel enough loyalty to the administration that they will support the nominees, but in doing so they are crossing some of the groups that support them. It is uncomfortable for them. And the Conservatives? They think the public doesn't care about judges. They think the public only cares about Iraq, the economy and perhaps now, energy. Senators believe that if they are seen spending much time on anything else the electorate may punish them.

If their argument is true, then it is because everyone from the president on down has not fought this fight on the right grounds. The president has made this a process question. "These nominees deserve an up or down vote, and so the filibuster is wrong."

In the Senate, it has largely been "Inside Baseball." All sorts of data are produced that show how unfair the current Democrats are compared to past Democrat Congresses and to the Republicans. Who cares?

The way this battle must be fought from now on is ideological. If the president won't say it, then Senators must. If you don't like God being taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance, or if you think that the Ten Commandments ought to be able to be displayed in public buildings, and if you don't think homosexuals have the right to marry, or if you think the Boy Scouts have the right to determine who can be Scout leaders, and if you think the death penalty is still appropriate for some crimes, then it matters who sits on the federal courts. Eighty percent of the controversial cases never reach the Supreme Court, but are settled by the Courts of Appeal. That is why the Liberals are blocking President Bush's excellent nominees. These are men and women who will not find rights in the Constitution that don't exist. These are men and women who do not seek to write laws. They would leave that to Congress. They are pledged only to interpret the law, which is what our Founding Fathers had in mind.

The Liberals are blocking these nominees because they have an agenda. They believe that these nominees would thwart that agenda. How else could it be explained that nominees who are judged "well qualified" by the American Bar Association, no friend of conservatives, are still stopped from getting on the court. There is only one reasonable explanation, and that is that these nominees might interfere with the far left agenda in which our Liberal friends believe.

In addition to that argument, Senators need to point out that the nominees being blocked were in some cases Hispanic or Blacks, in one case a black woman. The Liberals have allowed through whites with the same qualifications, since they can't block all nominees. The minorities are being stopped because they are conservative and would demonstrate that the liberal contention that to be Black or Hispanic you must be Liberal is a lie.

That is how, my beloved Senators, this battle must be fought. If it is fought that way, you will win. If you continue to fight an issue over process, once again Ted Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton will win.

The nominees President George W. Bush is selecting are first rate. They deserve better. Both the president and the Senators ought to provide a winning fight for them

[mhking]

When the White House is dumb enough to let the Democrats run the show on the Hill, what do you expect!?

And just wait -- the other nominees twisting in the wind are soon to suffer the same fate.

Watch; I can hear it now from Frist: "We can't force their hand; it's the middle of Primary election season..."

Feh.

[Uncle George]

The Socialist Demorats will pay a hundred times over for this trashing of the constitutional process. The garbage grinn of victory on Kennedys face will turn to a scowl of defeat after next election.