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 Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 10:11 pm Post subject: The Uncompromising Mr. Bush |
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This article just peeved me off! The msm will NEVER stop!!!!!
The Uncompromising Mr. Bush
| Quote: | By Carl M. Cannon
Sunday, May 29, 2005; Page B01
Before good-government types go all weak in the knees about the Great Filibuster Compromise of 2005, they might do well to recall the Great Filibuster Compromise of 2004.
Don't remember that one? That's understandable: It didn't change anything.
Bad blood: President Bush lost a fight to elevate U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering to a federal appellate seat. They met in the Oval Office a week before Pickering's defeat in March 2002. Such setbacks have stiffened Bush's resolve on his appointments, the author says.
Bad blood: President Bush lost a fight to elevate U.S. District Judge Charles Pickering to a federal appellate seat. They met in the Oval Office a week before Pickering's defeat in March 2002. Such setbacks have stiffened Bush's resolve on his appointments, the author says. (By Ron Edmonds -- Associated Press)
That deal, which was reached last May, guaranteed up-or-down votes on 25 Bush judicial nominees in exchange for a promise that the White House wouldn't bypass the Senate by making any more of those dastardly recess appointments to the bench. Those 25 judges were confirmed, bringing President Bush's total to nearly 200, in line with other recent presidents. According to a 2003 report from the Congressional Research Service, Ronald Reagan had 163 judges confirmed in his first term, Bill Clinton had 200 and Bush's father, in his only term, won approval for 191 of his judicial nominees.
But the compromise had no real effect at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Bush simply pressed ahead last year with his intention to put his stamp on the federal judiciary, naming the same kinds of conservatives after the 2004 deal -- and after his re-election -- as he had before. Sometimes he renominated the very same people who had been turned down earlier, reviving antagonisms with Democrats.
If anything, Bush redoubled his efforts, spurred on by the election campaign and the fight over gay marriage. "This difficult debate was forced upon our country by a few activist judges . . . who have taken it on themselves to change the meaning of marriage," he declared in his weekly radio address last July 11. Then he went off to a wedding -- of the very traditional kind -- in Georgetown. During that same week, he journeyed to Michigan to publicize the fact that all four of his nominees to the appellate courts from that state had been waiting two years for a vote; three were still awaiting action by the Senate Judiciary Committee.
What's to stop Bush from following the same course this year? Not much. Last year's compromise is a vague memory because it failed to alter any of the dynamics between the two sides of a philosophic divide that last week brought the Senate to the brink of a standstill.
There are, in fact, plenty of reasons to believe that the latest compromise will meet the same fate as the compromise of 2004. For starters, the White House is not a party to this deal, and White House support for it has been lukewarm, even noncommittal. That's significant because Bush doesn't appear to fear a showdown. Nor are the musty customs of the U.S. Senate at the top of the list of this president's priorities.
While Bush may not be a signatory to the deal, he can certainly blow it up. An acutely conservative Supreme Court candidate -- or a round of ultra - conservative appellate nominees -- would force Senate Democrats to figure out what they mean by that imprecise term of art, "extraordinary circumstances," which are supposed to be the prerequisite for future filibusters on judicial appointments. And, assuming Democrats turn to a filibuster at some point, that would test the allegiance of the Senate's moderate Republicans to a hallowed congressional tradition that would restrain the power of a president at a time when the president is from their own party.
These judicial fights have this tit-for-tat quality, which is understandable, but which leads, inevitably, to escalation rather than sober compromise. Democrats talk a lot about Bill Clinton's derailed judicial nominees. Republicans trump every such conversation with a card marked "Robert Bork."
There are practical reasons for Bush to lie low on this for a while. On Thursday, the Senate's GOP majority failed to shut off debate on U.N. ambassador designee John Bolton, postponing a decision until June -- and the White House wants that up-or-down vote. In addition to various appropriations bills pending in Congress, the administration is hoping for action on Social Security changes, a sweeping transportation bill and an energy bill this year -- all of which depend on Senate action.
Ultimately, however, the president will be back with more judicial nominees that will rankle the Democratic caucus, as well as liberal interest groups. The toughest test will arrive if and when it comes time to appoint a Supreme Court justice. This president does not publicly disparage his father, but his aides have made it clear that even if he has to go to the mat he will be sure not to appoint another David Souter, who was picked by the elder Bush and who has turned out to be more liberal than expected.
What the newly formed Gang of 14 will do then -- or even whether that ad hoc group that put together last week's compromise will stay together -- is anybody's guess. One member of the merry band, West Virginia Democrat Robert Byrd, may have crowed after the compromise, "We have kept the Republic!" But a more typical Democratic sentiment was expressed by North Dakota's Byron Dorgan, who termed last week's compromise "legislative castor oil" that only delays an inevitable and costly Senate showdown. continued |
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Sun May 29, 2005 11:30 pm Post subject: |
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Actually, I like this article.
I think the piece is not overly slanted (for the Washington Post) and the article describes Bush perfectly!!
In true corporate executive fashion, an MBA graduate says forget petty griping over what went on before he came to office and just get on with the job he was elected to do!!
I love it, Bush campaigned promising conservative nominees and that's what he's doing!!!
From page 2 of the article:
| Quote: | Bush's view of what's essential for the Republic is different. He came to office determined to retrieve the executive power he believed his predecessor had forfeited in the crucible of impeachment. This included -- and the irony here is unintentional -- reclaiming from the Senate the clear prerogative of nominating judges without undue concern about confirmation, even though it was Republicans who had dragged their feet on so many of Clinton's nominees.
"It's not easy to be nominated and then have your hearing held up for political purposes," Bush said. "These are good, decent people . . . for fairness sake, give them a vote, up or down."
If these words had a familiar ring to them, there was a reason: President Clinton used an almost identical appeal when the GOP bottled up his judicial nominees. "The Senate's failure to act on my nominations, or even to give many of my nominees a hearing, represents the worst of partisan politics," Clinton declared in a 1997 radio address. "Under the pretense of preventing so-called judicial activism, they've taken aim at the very independence our founders sought to protect."
A current Democratic senator with more than a passing interest in executive power seemed to be paving the way for her colleagues to accept some disappointment. "Usually when you have a compromise, which this was, it doesn't satisfy anybody 100 percent," Hillary Rodham Clinton told CNN's Judy Woodruff on Thursday afternoon. "And we will probably see the confirmation of people who are very extreme. And I regret that."
"Very extreme" is a phrase that itself sounds extreme, and such language is part of a larger debate taking place about whether Americans are really as divided as all that. Sen. Clinton, like most Democrats, is counting on the notion that Americans are generally mainstream and want their judges to be mainstream. So she's suggesting that Bush is nudging the judiciary to the right of that. For his part, the president won reelection after a campaign in which he vowed at every stop to appoint federal judges "who know the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law." This was tantamount to a promise to the voters he counted on most, those who are conservative on cultural issues and who are opposed to abortion.
Judicial activism -- of both the liberal and conservative varieties -- is where today's deadlocked politics meets the "culture wars." For that reason, it's inevitable that Bush would accede to the desires of his conservative base (and his own beliefs) when appointing federal judges. This is one clear way to leave a legacy for the people who share his social values -- and who voted for him and his party.
Bush's critics want him to show more deference to the Senate as an institution, and to heed the compromise forged by that bipartisan group of largely centrist senators. But that's not where Bush's head is. His father served in the House, and his grandfather in the Senate, but the 43rd president, our first MBA to hold office, is a child of the executive suite in temperament and training. The Senate's traditions are someone else's concern -- the province of Byrd perhaps, or maybe John McCain, Bush's nemesis from the days before 9/11. [b]Bush sees his job as defending executive power -- and trying to populate the third branch of government, the judiciary, with reliable conservatives.
In trying to understand Bush's motivations, and his possible next moves, one other thing must be said: He does not like the way Democrats talk about his nominees. The president has a personal relationship with some of his appointees, and he's met with the families of nearly all of them.
Bush is not pleased that Democrats have already derailed his ambition to appoint the first Latino, Miguel Estrada, to the Supreme Court by rejecting Estrada for an appeals court post. Bush believed it was deliberate character assassination when Democrats derailed Charles W. Pickering Sr. on charges of being racially insensitive; he got fighting mad when Priscilla Owen, a Texas homegirl, was characterized as "an extremist"; and the president was personally offended when Brett Kavanaugh, another of his nominees to the federal appellate bench, was denounced by People for the American Way as a "partisan ideologue" who is "unfit" for the job.
Bush wasn't occupying the White House when John Ashcroft, then a Republican senator from Missouri, derailed Ronnie White, one of Bill Clinton's judicial nominees, with the ludicrous slur that White was "pro-criminal." Bush has convinced himself that Democrats shouldn't consider such history. But they do, as Bush learned when he nominated Kavanaugh, whose crime in Democrats' eyes is that he served on independent counsel Kenneth Starr's staff.
Free from the burden of historical memory, Bush can just get indignant. He wasn't in town during Starr's investigation, and he thinks he knows the gentlemanly, soft-spoken Kavanaugh a bit better than liberal judicial activist Ralph Neas does -- for the simple reason that Kavanaugh works at the White House and Bush sees him almost every day. It was Kavanaugh's wedding that Bush went to a year ago in Georgetown after giving that radio address on judicial activism and marriage; Kavanaugh married Bush's personal secretary.
To paraphrase the late House speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.: These days, all politics is personal. |
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“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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