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Jewish World Review August 9, 2005 / 4 Av, 5765 Roberts is trouble By Marianne M. Jennings
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
You don't see liberals, with the notable exceptions of the neocons, Harry Stein, and David Horowitz, waking up with epiphanies that make them conservatives. Appoint ACLUer Ruth Ginsburg to the U.S. Supreme Court and you get ACLU rulings on municipal crèches. Put Thurgood Marshall on that same bench and you can bet your Birkenstocks that he'll issue a civil rights ruling in an SEC insider trading case. With the exceptions of the Clintons, who do what it takes for another crack at pardoning thugs and heisting White House furniture, liberals don't waffle.
Are liberals more committed? Are they more correct? Why do conservatives turn into them but not vice-versa? Is there some road to Damascus upon which conservatives are hijacked and tortured, as much as Gitmo-sensitive liberals will allow, with replays of Live-Aid concert tapes, until they submit to the ideology of peace, love, taxes, and Michael Moore? To wit: "Join us or it's the Sting and Bono duet again!"
Nay, liberals are not more correct. Neither are they more committed. One can hardly commit to a moving line. The advantage that liberals have over conservatives is fawning acceptance. Go their way and you become the toast of the town and most history books. Buck them and you end up in the trash heap with the Lotts, the DeLays, the Clarence Thomases, the Limbaughs, and the Newts. Scorn and mockery are the tools of the left. Few can withstand the barrage.
A member of the media once asked Ronald Reagan how he kept going and held firm in his convictions despite constant derision. His answer, "Because I'm right." Few conservatives have such conviction with so much grace. Most succumb to popularity's temptation. Newt Gingrich has paired up with Hillary on health care because Newt wants a mainstream comeback and they both crave acceptance and its power. Ken Starr, an iconic conservative who, according to leftist urban legend, has a 666 on his skull, found himself scrambling to clean up the damage from a CBS interview in which he hurt (whether by misquote or not) the Republican efforts to halt the Democrats' Senate judicial filibuster. Why on earth would a conservative speak with CBS in the first place?
They talk to the likes of CBS because it feels terrific. Being quoted by the left instead of lambasted by them has its lure. Castro, bin Laden, and third-world despots have more positive press than John Bolton.
With this backdrop, how difficult can this be? The single most important factor in appointing a Supreme Court justice is integrity: the ability to hold firm to one's convictions, even when the mockery envelopes you. When President Bush nominated John Roberts, I told my father, "He's trouble."
Trouble is inevitable because of conservatives' record for Supreme Court justices. Liberals need not fear anyone we lob up to the Senate for approval. Take our nominees, please. We don't even have the stamina to weather the hearings on a true conservative. So we send up these feel-good candidates who turn on us.
President Reagan had Sandra O'Connor go south on him. By the time she retired she was touting international law as a resource for interpreting our constitution. And she was drawing arbitrary and capricious 25-year limit lines on affirmative action in law school admissions. She became the toast of the left by legislating from the bench via piecemeal decisions that turned the high court into a body so political that the future of our representative government hangs on the appointment of one man.
Don't get me started on David Thoreau Souter. The man ate cottage cheese for lunch and lived alone among stacked books. Conservatives insist on the bread group at lunch and should have seen "weird" coming, to wit, "You're nominating a hermit?"
Anthony Kennedy fell into the "Like me please!" trap about December 2000. He sided with the group that reined in the Florida Supreme Court and left the chads hanging in the interest of having a president. Fearful of a legacy of "political hack," Kennedy has teamed up with Ginsburg and Souter. He hesitates, waffles, apologizes, and bends with the liberal winds. In the recent Kelo eminent domain case in which Connecticut property owners were ousted from their homes, Kennedy issued a concurring opinion that said, in effect, "I can't say when, but this seizing of land might get out of hand." It has, sir, it already has. Ask any conservative who approved your appointment.
Roberts signals this approval-desire-disease. He and his wife placed their wedding announcement in the New York Times. There it is! Conservatives don't cotton to such vaudevillian displays. Such newspaper-of-record wedding announcements ooze with the self-importance of the insecure.
Those around Roberts have pointed out, quite unanimously, that he doesn't wear his religion on his sleeve. What on earth does that mean? We're not asking for an arm patch that boasts, "Catholic and proud of it," or "They will have to pry my cold dead fingers from the confessional." How about someone who does not exhibit the insecurity of hiding that his faith is an integral part of him?
Roberts' recent troubles over his failure to disclose his "helpful" and "strategic" pro bono work on the Colorado Romer v. Evans (a Kennedy wonder decision telling the citizens of Colorado that they could not vote to exclude sexual orientation as a protected class) case is troublesome. There it is again — a desire so great to win acceptance that it trumped forthrightness. A little more religion on the sleeve and a little less tromping on values to reach a goal — that Ten Commandments stuff is mighty helpful in a "To disclose or not disclose" situation such as one's pro bono work for gay rights groups when accepting a conservative's nomination. Perhaps he just forgot. Perhaps he felt such pro bono work would help him with his wedding announcement newspaper.
Mr. Bush should withdraw Judge Roberts as his nominee. The misrepresentation, whether innocent or otherwise, about his pro bono work, reveals a character flaw. All we ask is a nominee with conviction who does not require trivial accolades and mainstream note. With a Justice Roberts, the liberals worry that the 5-4 decisions will disappear. They are correct. With Roberts there, the Ginsburg et al. block will grow to 6-3.
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JWR contributor Marianne M. Jennings is a professor of legal and ethical studies at Arizona State
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© 2005, Marianne M. Jennings |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
