Wave Maker: A Little Honesty, Please...

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Wednesday, June 01, 2005

A Little Honesty, Please...

...is the title of a Megan McArdle post I missed before the filibuster compromise --she says this:

"Can Democrats and Republicans stop pretending that there is some exquisitely fine distinction between judicial filibusters and legislative filibusters that makes flip-flopping on whatever they said five years ago something other than a gossamer-thin wrapping for the otherwise naked use of power? Or that they really, deep down, care about the deepest arcana of Senate procedure?

The fact is that Republicans are going to shove conservative judges down liberal throats because they can, not because there is some cosmic principle of justice involved. And Democrats should tone down the histrionics about the fundamental illegitimacy of Republican court-packing, when the reason the Republicans are so determined to pack the court is that it is the only way Democrats have left them to undo the quasi-legislation that liberal judges wrote after Democrats packed the court decades ago. Having remade the rules about how legislation gets made, you can't just tell the Republicans that it's some sort of metaphysical abuse if they try to touch the ball."

She sure is right, although her point doesn't address whether or not this down-throat shoving is something that is wise, necessary, or beneficial to the party or the Country. I've never been much a fan of the old excuse, "it all started when he hit me back."

From my perspective, the quest for honesty seems to me to be a Sisyphean task -- if Senators were actually intellectually honest in the way they approached judicial nominations, we'd have Robert Bork instead of David Souter, and the ABA ranking system would have some relevance and respect. Instead, one of the most brilliant legal minds of our time was relegated to the judicial sidelines (although his books have continued to provoke thought and sell well); and the ABA's official role in ranking federal judicial nominees, exposed as a thinly veiled ruse for opposing nominees who didn't toe their party line, was eliminated in 1997.

Now it's all about "interest group politics." The judicial selection process is now a significant means by which liberal and conservative interest groups raise money. They use it as a means to fire up their base, flooding the Capitol with letters and postcards and demonstrators with placards containing incendiary and vitriolic slogans. These demonstrations of grass roots power and organizational strength bolster the interest group's standing in the national party apparatus, increasing their power over such matters as platform planks and even Vice-Presidential selections.

It's power politics. And when in pursuit of more power, or the retenion thereof, intellectual honesty seems an insignificant commodity to all but the bravest and strongest of human souls.

Posted by: Wave Maker / 2:38 PM/ |