Supreme Court Nominees

Now that Bush has gone to round two on the nominees, he has done what I and millions of others predicted, and named a staunch conservative to the bench. I personnally do not know if Sam Alito is qualified to be on the Supreme Court or not, but I suspect he is and that he will probably be confirmed.

The big question is how will the left act in this process. If they go full out and fight tooth and nail on it, they will most probably lose (they only have 45 votes) and in the process premanently destroy the judicial system in the United States. We will be back to stealth candidates (David Souter) with no record, no opinion and probably no brain to speak of.

What they should remember is something John McCain said on the Imus show yesterday. Namely, elections have consequences. Bush won. For any Democrats reading this. You may despise W and every thing he stands for. But in the end he won. He beat Al Gore in 2000 (conspirators to the contrary) and John Kerry in 2004. He won, he gets to pick. You want another choice, quit nominating losers for the presidency. W was eminently beatable both times and the Democratic Party was simply to incompetent to do it. That is a reality.

Since Bush won, he gets to pick his nominees. And thus we have Alito.

There is no guarantee on how they act once they are on the bench though. Many remain the shallow unthinking people they were before being nominated (Thomas and Ginsberg for example) and others transform into entirely different entities. Remember that Earl Warren, the great defender of civil rights while on the court, was the single most important force behind the internment of the Japanese-Americans during WW2. Eisenhower called him (Warren) his worst mistake. In the end, when giving people lifetime appointments, you free them from the need to make anyone happy. For some this is a freedom to expand and change, for others it is not. But there is no way to tell.