Let’s count the ways in which the appointment of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court was a disaster, shall we?<\/p>\n
1. It didn’t start with Alito. It started with Alberto Gonzales, who Bush wanted to put onto the Supreme Court because, as is now obvious, Gonzales is super-competent.<\/p>\n
2. After being told that Gonzales was not viable because he wasn’t anti-abortion enough for the fire-breathing wing of the Republican party, Bush appointed White House Counsel Harriet Miers, who at least made some sense from an optics standpoint, as she was replacing outgoing Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the court’s first female member.<\/p>\n
3. Of course, Miers turned out to be even more of a lightweight than Gonzales, prompting Bush to pull her nomination, and give it to Alito, who the fire-breathers loved, because he was considered to be a clone of Antonin Scalia.<\/p>\n
4. This, of course, meant that there were more conservative Catholic men of Italian descent\u00a0 from New Jersey on the court (2) than women of any ideological stripe (1), despite the fact that women make up 51 percent of Americans, and conservative Catholic men of Italian descent from New Jersey make up a somewhat smaller percentage.<\/p>\n
5. To add insult to injury, Democrats declined to filibuster the Alito nomination because that would be mean and unserious, a precedent that I’m sure will hold until the Senate is voting on President Obama’s first SCOTUS nominee, at which point the GOP will have to filibuster that moderately pro-choice nominee on the grounds that they’re moderately pro-choice.<\/p>\n
David Broder will nod sagely, and suggest the Democrats compromise by instead putting Robert Bork on the court.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Let’s count the ways in which the appointment of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court was a disaster, shall we? 1. It didn’t start with Alito. It started with Alberto Gonzales, who Bush wanted to put onto the Supreme Court … Continue reading