I offer a blast from the past, the post I wrote on Roberts nomination, when it became clear the Democrats weren’t going to fight it… (Oh, and also, for those who think I use impolite language now, read this.)
People are very strange in very many different ways. To me what is strangest about people is how many of them cannot see what is completely obvious. Let’s take the Afghani elections. Some parties weren’t allowed to run. More votes were cast than the entire population of the country, US money was funneled to certain parties, we had reliable reports that registration cards were for sale, we know that bribed power brokers controlled voter registration. So, when the election monitors came back and reported that the election had been free, everyone smiled and patted themselves on their idiot backs. But, of course, even assuming they were right that no ballot boxes had been stuffed in the few ridings they were in, the election was as free as any other election where a foreign power determines what parties are allowed to run, where more people vote than are alive and where regional bosses determine who votes.
The whole Roberts thing is looking very similiar.
Bush has said that he loves Scalia and Thomas and that he would appoint a justice like them.
Roberts has spent a good part of his life working for Republicans in general and for the Bush family in particular. He gave Jeb Bush advice in the 2000 Florida recount (and we can guess, from what happened at the time, that that advice was how to recall the legislature and award the victory to Bush if the Supremes fell down on the job.)
His wife is in charge of a pro-life organization so extreme that they wanted Schiavo kept half-alive in a vegetative state.
He has given George Bush the right to ignore the Geneva conventions, in direct contradiction to the part of the constitution that makes any treaty part of the law of the land.
The rightest of right wing flakes, guys like Dobson and the Family Research Council, have endorsed him.
But because he doesn’t have a lot of judicial opinions he ordered written for him by his clerks we’re supposed to think we don’t know where he stands? We know who loves him. We know who he’s chosen to work with all his life. We know who he sleeps with. We have seen not a single decision from the bench that indicates that any of the other things we know is wrong.
We know he’s a telegenic, smarter, version of Thomas or Scalia – at best, Rhenquist.
Bush and his allies aren’t subtle people. They tell you what they’re going to do, often years in advance, and then they do it. They do this time in, time out. And yet, for some reason, people still don’t believe them.
So let’s bring it back. Any failure to recognize that Roberts is Scalia prettied up is just gutless timidity and an unwillingness to look the facts full in the face. It isn’t some intellectually principled ‘we must wait till all the evidence is in’, it’s the exact opposite – an unwillingness to operate on the strong evidence which already exists.
And compromising on Roberts, being unwilling to filibuster him, is just another way of saying “I don’t really give enough of a fuck about civil liberties, about a woman’s right to control her own body, about the imperial presidency, about habeas corpus, or about torture to put up more than a token fight.”
The filibuster deal was the pre-surrender of 14 “moderates” to the Bush administration. Fighting is too much bother, upholding the constitution and the rules of the Senate is too much trouble, so we’ll just compromise ourselves right now and save everyone from having a real fight on the real issues.
Democrats in Congress are only willing to take on fights they’ve already won. What’s their big victory these days? Oh yeah, saving Social Security. They managed to defend the third rail of American politics. That’s the level they’re reduced to – that their only significant victory of the last five years is keeping the most popular government program in existence going.
But if something requires a bit more of a fight than that, if it requires going out and saying “Roberts sleeps with a woman who thinks that Congress was right to try and keep Terry Schiavo alive against her own wishes and those of her husband”, well they can’t do it.
I mean, it’s not a hard fucking fight. Everyone is acting as if because he has a nice plastic smile and has some actual friends who say actual nice things about him, that he can’t be stopped.
Tie him to the loons who everyone despises – the ones who wanted to keep Terry a zombie, and then burn them together.
And while you’re at it, take out the Fedealist Society. The White House is now saying that Roberts doesn’t “recollect” if he was ever a member – does no one have any fucking killer instinct left? Mock him mercilessly on this. No one forgets such a thing. Use his unwillingness to admit it to destroy both him and the Federalist Society, so that no judge will ever dare join them ever again.
This fight is not only winnable, it is eminently winnable. If someone has the balls to fight, fight hard and fight dirty.
As always there are real consequences to this – real people are going to die and suffer because Roberts makes it to the court. Real women, real girls, may well bleed out in alleyways because of this. Innocent people may go to jail without ever having a chance to face their accusers and the US may go to more wars because Roberts believes that Senate oversight is lese majeste.
But apparently this is just another fight the Dems are going to roll over on. One look at Roberts’ pretty face and their knees went all weak and they decided that the trust they owe those whom they’ve spent the last thirty years promising, “if nothing else, we’ll protect Roe”, means nothing.
Cause hey, their wives, their daughters, will be flown out of the country.
It’s only the little people who’ll pay the price.
And who gives a fuck about them?
