| Wednesday, October 12, 2005 |
| Life is like a box of Bushes |
With all the GOP in-fighting over Harriet Miers, it seems almost poetic that the right is finally facing the consequences of its own past compromises in pursuit of power. Pulling up that quote again from Daniel Henninger in Friday's WSJ:
In 1982, five years before Ronald Reagan nominated Robert Bork to the High Court, law students at several top-tier schools founded the Federalist Society, dedicated to shaping a robust, coherent conservative theory of jurisprudence. Robert Bork was a society lodestar, the most formidable conservative jurist of his generation. The Democrats destroyed his nomination by personalizing their disagreement with him. After that, reforming and retaking the Court became a personal crusade for many conservatives.
While this battle raged in 1987, George Bush was a businessman in Texas. He was in no sense an active participant in the political or intellectual wars being waged in Washington. Seven years later, he entered Texas politics as governor. ... Not active? He wasn't a particpant at all, by all accounts. Thirteen years later, in 2000, Governor George Bush seems to have shown not a whit more interest in the monumental ideological struggles of the day, whether over Roe vs. Wade or the "runaway" courts or public prayer (read Molly Ivins if you don't believe me). As Texas governor, he seemed more jazzed about tax cuts, baseball and speaking Spanish than about whether judicial activism had turned the federal courts into super-legislatures.
Conservatives -- and especially the neoconservatives and American Enterprise Institute types -- knew that, and they had cultivated a long list of intellectual peers destined for government (or for unprecedented influence over government), but none of those, except for Donald Rumsfeld, had ever run for president. For whatever reason, few on the right (except Bill Kristol and other neocons) trusted John McCain to carry the conservative banner into the White House. Perhaps the other cogs in the movement wheel -- particularly evangelicals -- just couldn't get over his loathing of leaders like Jerry Falwell. Instead, the right settled on a 2000 presidential nominee who was so far outside their camp, he weren't even in the woods. (Pairing him with Cheney helped, but apparently, Cheney has lost his grip on the leash...)
Conservatives decided of their own volition to throw their support behind an essentially blank slate whom they knew could win, and therefore could carry their projects forward and cement enough federal power to see them through. Karl Rove sold Bush as the guy who could turn conservative theory into reality. In Dubya, the three "provinces" of the conservative movement -- evangelicals, free market ubercapitalists and Wilsonian neocons, essentially got a vessel they could pour their dreams into. But only one province -- the capitalists -- were getting the real deal (on tax cuts and corporate rewards from the public tiller, though not on spending.) What the intellecutals gave up, however, was someone truly committed to the conservative ideological struggle, and who could articulate and truly advance the cause. Now George W. Bush is giving the conservative movement exactly what he was for them: a blank slate who can theoretically win, but who doesn't advance the cause.
It's important that those conservatives who most vehemently oppose the Miers nomination -- in sharp contrast to the Brit Hume, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh types who spend much of their time in relation to this president on their knees -- oppose her even if they are willing to assume she will ultimately vote exactly as they want her to. Their goal stretches beyond winning the head counts -- they wanted someone who could articulate more than 30 years of conservative legal reasoning to the full Court and to the country, giving hard-won legitimacy to the ideas and ideals embodied by their former standard-bearer, Judge Bork. Miers, even if she appends herself to Tony Scalia and joins Clarence Thomas as the Italian Scallion's other echo, can't do the job, because like the president she adores, she hasn't really thought through the big questions and issues conservatives built whole think tanks just to wrestle with all these years.
Even first rate legal mind John Roberts, because he has been so coy about his judicial philosophy and views of the law, fails the test because his nomination makes short work of hte notion that jurists with well-known, publicly articulated stands on monumental issues have no future as Supreme Court justices. Bush could have corrected that, in the eyes of conservatives, with his second nomination. Why he chose not to will be the debate among political junkies like me for some time...
Ironically, it didn't have to be this way. Conservatives could have had a card carrying member of their intellectual star chamber, who was an original signatory to the Project for a New American Century and the founder of his own think tank, who had put conservative educational ideas to the test in the real world by co-founding a charter school, who is by all accounts something of a religious zealot (Terri Schiavo and the faith-based prison come to mind), who loathes affirmative action (as opposed to his brother's mumblings about "affirmative access"), who seems to have long desired nothing more than to be president, and who could have carried both the political and the intellectual banner of the conservative movement, along with the requisite name brand: his name was Jeb Bush. (There's also a great deal of grime there, partcularly in his business dealings and ties to questionable characters in the Cuban-American community, not to mention his disfunctional family, but there you go...)
It's one of those little bugaboos of history that had Jeb won his 1994 gubernatorial race and his older brother lost his, Jeb likely would have been the one running for president in 2000. Had he won, there there probably still would have been a war in Iraq but there might well have been no Dubya clone headed to the Supreme Court today (Jeb lost because he was up front about his hard core right wing principles, while George presented the image of mushy "compassionate conservatism" in Texas). (Sidebar: Jeb Bush seems to be a mean S.O.B. -- even surlier than his brother according to people I've talked to who have dealt with him. He would have put up Priscilla Owen and Michael Luttig and ordered the Democrats to like it or get bent.)
Now that his brother and father have made such a mess of the presidency, and possibly poisoned the Bush name in the conservative lexicon forever -- not to mention among the sane electorate -- Jebbie probably won't ever get his chance to show his team what he can do.
Sounds like the wingers gambled on the wrong Bush.
Tags: Harriet Miers, Supreme Court, Politics, SCOTUS, Law, News, Bush |
posted by JReid @ 12:57 AM   |
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