Senator grills Shedd on abortion views

Circuit Court nominee Judge Dennis W. Shedd faced tough questioning yesterday by a Senate panel, including one Democrat who threatened to vote against the candidate's confirmation unless he detailed his views on abortion.

The South Carolina district judge was nominated by President Bush to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. He declined to state his abortion views, saying it would require his recusal in future court hearings on the issue.

"In part, I am outraged because there are some who would profile Judge Shedd as merely a white male from the South and start from there to give him a certain treatment," Mr. Hatch said.

Good statement, but as we have seen, black males receive the same treatment if they have the rotten luck to be a President Bush nominee.

And Schumer's insistence on using a litmus test should be called exactly what it is: illegal. Judge Dennis W. Shedd gave exactly the correct response, for all the good it will do him.

If this treatment continues I would expect to see nominees asking to have their nominations withdrawn. These judicial hearings are nothing more than verbal lynchings initiated by a men without honor, imo.

Why would anyone want to subject themselves to the viscious attacks and public humiliation that garners them nothing? Whew.

Please, God, help us take back the Senate.

To me, the fascinating thing is the way abortion absolutely obsesses the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, to the extent of excluding all other considerations from their minds. To judge from their behavior in these hearings, they regard abortion as the touchstone of all political principle, the rock against which conservatives must be dashed. Indeed, there is more variation of opinion on abortion among Republicans than among Democrats; anyone who's bothered to watch a snippet of their recent national conventions knows it.

Why?

It's highly unlikely that any of these Senators, who are all in the second halves of their lives, seek an abortion themselves. Therefore, direct personal effects from the issue can be discounted. So it must be a matter of the effects they think any perceived "wavering" on the issue would have on their support come re-election time.

But can this be? Could a Democratic senator's opinions and votes on matters that have some tangential connection to abortion really be that critical to his re-election prospects? It just doesn't seem likely, but perhaps I'm under-informed.

Is it perhaps a matter of party discipline? Could the Democratic Party's national power structure have threatened its candidates with the withholding of support should there be any break in their united front on abortion? I don't think anything like that has happened in the GOP, on abortion or any other issue.

This issue, on which conservatives are largely agreed that the current no-restrictions regime is unacceptable, has been used to block conservative judicial nominees for twenty years. It arises as a spearpoint issue in executive and legislative races, even when the office being contested has no bearing on the abortion question. If the Right can somehow surmount this obstacle, it can achieve a large advance.

In 1980, the Republican National Convention handled abortion neatly by classifying it as a federalism issue: a matter, under the rule of the Tenth Amendment, within the demesne of the state legislatures rather than the federal courts. 1980 was a good year for the GOP. Perhaps that approach should be revisited.

A consensus about abortion is likely to emerge in the next couple of decades. Probably it will be ruled permissible until the baby displays brain waves, and murder thereafter. That would make the legal standard for life consistent with the legal standard for death, and would assuage the entirely justifiable outrage people feel over late-term abortions of fully formed, viable babies, especially partial-birth abortions. However, this is the sort of decision that properly belongs to state legislatures and courts; it is in no way a Constitutional issue.

And therein lies the rub! The abortion issue must be de-federalized to get it out of the way of the GOP. If we fail to do this, all too many Congressional and Senatorial elections Republicans could win will fall to Democrats instead, and judges who would apply the written law as it is written, rather than "interpreting" it to protect a fictitious Constitutional right to abort, will continue to be blocked for that reason and no other.

Freedom, Wealth, and Peace,
Francis W. Porretto
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