RUSH: We want to move on now with audio sound bites from the on this judicial opening. Is it not amazing, folks? You go back to ’81 when Reagan appointed Sandra Day O’Connor. When she was appointed, there was a lot of opposition to Sandra Day O’Connor, and over the course of her terms as a Supreme Court justice, there were a lot of people that took shots at her, but if you listen to the left now, why, she was a model! “A pragmatist. Centrist! We need to get someone like her.” That’s because she was an activist. They like her. She was an activist and they want activist judges. You’ve gotta get rid of this new terminology of “conservative” and “liberal” to describe judges. It’s activist versus originalist, and that’s what it’s come down to, and the libs don’t want an originalist because they don’t want the original intent of the Constitution “interpreted.”
They want it to be bent and shaped and flaked and formed; they want it to be able to grow to accommodate whatever depravity they want to define as “normalcy” and whatever increasing government power they can articulate and bring about. They want the court backing all that up and of course the original intent of the Founders was to limit the power of the federal government; so they had no interest in originalists, and originalists is going to be called a right-wing conservative. They love O’Connor. They hated her but now they love her — and Gonzales? If you watched any of the Sunday shows isn’t it amazing, folks, to see how the liberals in the Democratic Party and the media have come together to embrace Alberto Gonzales?
Why, even roundtable discussion participants like Mara Liasson and Juan Williams and others are out there saying, “Gonzales, the current attorney general, why, that’s the guy! He’s the guy. He should be the next appointee,” and there’s only one reason for it: The guy is pro-choice and conservatives don’t like him, and so he’s not an originalist and they’re all for it. But here’s what gets me. When he was up for attorney general, and they had the confirmation hearings the same people who now say (laughing) and don’t think this is lost on a lot of people. If I can remember this I’m sure a lot of people do and can. They tried to accuse Alberto Gonzales of authoring torture memos and in the current context that’s the worst thing anybody in this country could do, torture. “Why, that’s horrible! That’s rotten! That’s not us. We can’t abide torture,” and yet they tried to keep him from being the attorney general because he authored torture memos.
Now, I know it was just an effort to pin the torture memos on Bush, but nevertheless, they said this stuff about Gonzales, and they fought tooth and nail to keep him from becoming attorney general — and now the same people who thought he was horrible for attorney general, now are eager to put him on the Supreme Court as the replacement for Sandra Day O’Connor. I think it just shows the utter lack of consistency on the part of the left, be it political or ideological, however you want to define it. But it’s amazing to watch. Let’s go the audio sound bites. Last Friday night on ABC’s World News Tonight reporter Dan Harris did a piece on the new Supreme Court nominee. Here is a portion of his report.
HARRIS: From both liberal and conservative war rooms came an almost instantaneous avalanche of e-mails and press releases, containing messages later hammered home in hastily arranged press conferences and talk radio rants.
RUSH ARCHIVE: God has nine heads and god just lost a head today, and the left has to make sure their god has nine heads with at least five of them on their side.
HARRIS: Those on the left may have the most to lose.
GANDY: This is a fight of our lives. This is a state of of emergency…for women.
RUSH: That is Kim Gandy, the president of the NAGs who may represent about 800 women in this country in their thinking. I pointed this out to you last Friday. You go to NAGs’ website and you expect to see this great tribute to the first-ever female Supreme Court justice, and all you got was four pictures of women who died because of Supreme Court decisions, abortion and this sort of stuff. There was barely a mention of Sandra Day O’Connor. So I just want to say to Mr. Harris, “That was not a rant.” Number two: “I’m not part of a war room,” and number three, “I don’t communicate with any of these people on the right raising money for this so-called ’cause’.” To place my comments in context, the Supreme Court is the left’s god.
Abortion is their sacrament, and their god has nine heads, and as long as they got five or more heads of their god, then they control events. This is more important than the presidential race, folks, this court because they’re attempting to institutionalize liberalism and they’re trying to keep it away from the ballot box because they can’t win at the ballot box. It’s crucial. They know they’re cracking up and they know that they’re descending, and the court is their last gasp. I mean this may be — if not their last; it’s very close to — their last stand, this nomination and however many others that the president gets. Let’s move on now. Last Friday on the Senate floor, Senator Ted Kennedy. He weighed in with this about the Supreme Court pending nominee.
THE SWIMMER: If the president abuses his power and nominates someone who threatens to roll back the rights and freedoms of the American people, then the American people will insist that we oppose that nominee and we intend to do so.
RUSH: Yeah. (sigh) Fine, senator. This is a man who started all this, by the way. If you want to know where aaaaall this got started, go back to 1986 and Robert Bork, and Ted Kennedy’s little phrase, “Robert Bork’s America is an America where women will be forced to get back alley abortions; blacks will be segregated in the back of the bus and lunch counters. Rogue police will storm into your house in the dark of night to do it.” It was libel. It was full-fledged libel, and its weight and content was not appreciated at the time by the forces supporting Judge Bork. It was thought to be what it was: the rant of a lunatic — and it was thought that nobody would take it seriously, and instead not only did people take it seriously but Ted Kennedy has become the architect of all of this partisanship, rancor. All these fights over Supreme Court nominees, it’s Ted Kennedy. You can take it right back. Say here he is saying, “If the president abuses his power and nominates someone who threatens to roll back the rights and freedoms of the American people…” There is no such nominee on the president’s list. This is just such a straw dog. Nobody that he’s going to nominate would roll back rights; no one person can roll back rights. This is absolutely silly.
But you have to define “rights,” too, as Senator Kennedy means it — and his version of rights are granting normalcy to depravity. That’s how I put it. Depraved behavior to liberals is going to become normal. They don’t want any guidelines, no guardrails. They don’t want any right or wrong. They want it floating. Whatever they happen to be at the moment, they want to be defined as normal. Their constituents are the same way. You know, I saw Vilsack — Vilsack, governor of Iowa — has just passed a law or signed into law that felons will be able to vote. When are we going to give terrorists the vote? That’s what I want to know. If the Democratic Party is so eager to expand its base then it has to grant the rights to vote to felons, then by God let’s go grant the rights to their second biggest constituency and that’s terrorists because they are the defense lawyers for terrorists, terrorist prisoners and everywhere else.
They’re the ones who are doing everything they can to aid and assist the terrorists in their war against us so let’s go ahead and make a move to give terrorists the vote. Why not? We know who they’d vote for, and the Democrats need every vote they can get, folks, based on the direction they’re headed.
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RUSH: If you’re going to grant felons the right to vote, how far behind can it be the Democrats will suggest letting terrorists vote — particularly those who have been abused in our prisons, and our torture ships that are plowing the great seas of the oceans of the world? It’s a great constituency waiting to be tapped out there, the terrorist vote. Why not? What’s the difference? Ted Kennedy, ABC with George Stephanopoulos, This Week, the show yesterday. In addition to Ted Kennedy, Arlen Specter was on, and Kennedy says here in this bite… This is just… It’s insane. “If it wasn’t for O’Connor, people in wheelchairs would have to crawl upstairs,” like Ted Kennedy has to do every day after happy hour.
THE SWIMMER: Sandra Day O’Connor, uh, besides recognizing the rule of law, for example, in the Roe v. Wade, uh, decision, was the key vote on many, many issues and questions. For examples [sic], on the Americans with Disability Act, so that a wheelchair person doesn’t have to crawl up a flight of stairs in order to be represented in a courthouse, (gasp) giving patients a second opinion in her HMO case, (gasp) making sure that we weren’t going to execute mentally retarded individuals, and protecting the Clean Air Act —
RUSH: Hold! Hold! Hold a minute, Alltmont, stop the tape. Stop the tape! Didn’t Bill Clinton execute Ricky Ray Rector? In the middle of the ’92 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton — and Sandra Day O’Connor was a justice then — flew back to Arkansas to make sure that Ricky Ray Rector, who was retarded, was fried in the Arkansas gas chamber, electric chair, whatever it was. In fact, you know what Ricky Ray Rector, they offered him his last meal, whatever it was, and a piece of pie — and he put the pie aside. He saved the piece of pie for when he came back from the electric chair. The pie did not get eaten because he didn’t come back from the electric chair.
Few people ever have, unless it’s Old Sparky down in Florida. Clinton went back and did this in the middle of the campaign, you know, to get the NRA vote and the capital punishment vote and so forth. So I don’t know what he’s talking about here. “She made sure that we weren’t going to execute mentally retarded individuals.” She must have forgotten Bill Clinton. Here’s the rest of the bite.
KENNEDY: — decisions were decided by 5-4 decisions. And we as — particularly on the eve of the Fourth of July when we realize that men and women have sacrificed, have bled, have even died, uh, for the rights and liberties of this country, it is up-a to our generation to make sure that we’re going to pass those rights and liberties on to the next generation.
RUSH: Senator Kennedy, you know, you’re just a gas bag, sir. The bottom line is, when you and your pals can win another election, you go ahead and pick the nominee, but until then just go away. Shut up. It’s not your choice. You do not get to pick the nominee. Somebody needs to stand up and tell him this, instead of saying, “Yes, Senator Kennedy, we’ll work with you. We’ll be glad to have a summit with you. We’ll be glad to let you participate in the process so that we don’t roil the country.” Just go away. You don’t get to pick the nominees when you lose the elections. So Stephanopoulos read Kennedy’s own words from 1967 back to him where Kennedy explains that times have changed; the standard for judges now is their philosophy and ideology.
Here’s what Stephanopoulos said: “In 1967, when were arguing for Thurgood Marshall, you warned colleagues they shouldn’t take judicial philosophy into account. They shouldn’t reject someone just because they disagree with that judicial philosophy and you said that only background experience, qualifications, and temperament should be considered. If it was ‘the right standard’in 1967, isn’t that the right standard now?
THE SWIMMER: Well, that, uh, I think has really, uh, changed and shifted hasn’t it? When they, uh, the president [Reagan] sent, uh, Robert Bork, uh, to the, uh, Senate judiciary committee for nomination, because it was very clear that he was selected primarily because of his judicial philosophy. They made it really an issue there, and it became the — the issue before the judiciary committee and the country, and I think if someone is going to be selected just because of a judicial philosophy, then, uh, that is going to be an issue that’s —
STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator —
THE SWIMMER: — going to be before the judiciary committee.
RUSH: So you have just inconsistency and hypocrisy piled upon itself here. When the left wants one of their nominees we’re not supposed to examine anything about them. We’re just supposed to, “for the good of the country,” move ’em out and vote ’em up and send them up to the court, as in Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others. But when it’s somebody the liberals don’t like? “Ah, we need summit. We need to change the rules,” and I’m getting blue in the face telling you why they’re doing this. Just don’t forget. Institutionalizing liberalism in the courts. That’s all this is about because they know they don’t have a prayer of winning anything nationally that is of liberal nature at the ballot box. Let’s move on to Good Morning America today; Charles Gibson talking to Senator Orrin Hatch. They had this exchange.
GIBSON: You said a moment ago you suspected that the president would choose a very conservative candidate and you said I think that he ought to do that. Should he or should he try to find somebody who would be more acceptable to all spectrums?
HATCH: When it comes to the Supreme Court, it comes down to just one issue to most Democrats, and that is Roe vs. Wade, and, you know, the president’s going to choose a conservative. I don’t think he’s going to choose a right-wing person but he’s going to choose a conservative, a rock-ribbed conservative, and I’ve seen about 14 names, and every one of them happens to be qualified, highly intelligent people of great dimension, great ability, good temperament. I just think the Democrats are going to have a rough time if they think they’re going to take some of these people apart.
RUSH: All right, Gibson’s question: “Should he or should he try to find somebody who would be more acceptable to all spectrums?” Charlie, it’s time for you and your pals on the left to learn you are not “the spectrum” anymore. You are in the minority. You are losing elections. You don’t get to choose who the nominee is based on what your worldview is. That’s for when you win elections. When you win elections, Charlie, then you can go ahead and go out and try to pick somebody who “appeals.” This is just so absurd, and it’s just so irritating. Because all this does, as I said Friday, is illustrate how outrageous all this has become. This is not to be a political institution, but that is precisely what it’s become. This is a judicial legal institution that has been corrupted by this type of campaigning, trying to go out and pick a justice that’s going to be acceptable to all the people? What the hell! To the spectrum? I mean, who’s going to decide who the spectrum is? Well, you do that by virtue of elections, and, Charlie, your side is losing. Your network is losing. NBC is losing. You’re losing viewers. Newspapers are losing circulation.
You don’t control the spectrum anymore. I know it’s a tough thing to admit. Now, as to Hatch. “Bush won’t nominate a right-wing conservative”? That’s Kennedy-speak. What the in the world is one of our guys out there talking about, “Yeah, he’ll nominate a conservative, but he won’t nominate a right-wing conservative.” There’s no such thing here. Either you believe in the Constitution and the constitutional role of a justice or you don’t. You are either an originalist or you are an activist. An originalist believes in the limits of the judiciary and respects representative government of and by and for the people, or you’re an activist who believes in judicial supremacy and you don’t respect representative government unless the liberals are in charge of it. I don’t know how you can be a little bit for the Constitution. That’s what they call pragmatists or moderates.
In Hatch’s case, not right-wing conservatives. You know, Senator Hatch, if you were nominated, they would call you a right-wing conservative, because to the left, a conservative is an extremist right-winger. There is no distinction, as far as the opponents here are concerned. This kind of language is not helpful, and it’s not going to buy any goodwill from the left. That’s what’s also so frustrating.
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RUSH: Let me just ask you a question, folks. Who do you trust? James Madison, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton — three of the most prominent founders of the country — or Ted “The Swimmer” Kennedy, Chuck Schumer, and Dick Durbin? Who would you trust among those three? Why do the liberals have so much difficulty with the Constitution? Why do they insist on changing it through unelected judges? And the answer is simple. The Founders wanted limited government. That’s what the whole Bill of Rights does: it limits the power of the federal government. The left wants big government.
It’s this simple. All you need to do is look at the eminent domain decision in New London, Connecticut. It’s really all you have to do. Did you hear Ted Kennedy disagree with that? Did you hear any liberals disagree with that decision? Very, very few, folks. Why? Because it empowered government over the little guy. The Democrats have gotten away for way too long with this assumption by people that they’re for the little guy standing up against big corporate interests and big powerful rich people, and if not for the Democrats the little guy would be getting trampled.
Because of the Democrats little guys get trampled, and it is conservatives who are standing up for the little guys, conservatives railing against these big corporate interests as chosen by the government of New London, Connecticut, over the existing private proper owners there, and you didn’t hear any liberal — Nancy Pelosi won’t stand up and object to it. What she said about this makes such little sense that you have to really question her IQ if you ask me. One of the weakest intellectual leaders the Democratic Party has ever come up with in the House there, Miss America, but regardless, it really comes down to this — and you know, I run into a lot of Democrats who don’t associate themselves with the kook fringe that runs the party but they still believe in their hearts the Democrats are for the little guy.
The best way to understand this is that it’s the elites versus the people. The best way to explain liberalism to people is not that they care for the little guy. Liberals care about themselves and big government. They are the elites, and they don’t trust the little guy. Liberals don’t trust you at the ballot box. They don’t trust you with your own money or with the decisions in your own life. They simply don’t trust you — and for good reason: You would behave and vote in ways that would limit their power as elites. They come from this arrogant, condescension attitude that only they have the smarts to run the country and to run your life and the world; you just don’t have it. But if we turn the Constitution back to the people, and it’s representative government that results in the laws that are made and the constitutionality of those laws is only interpreted by the court, then the liberal elites are in trouble.
As elites they’re already in trouble when the Soviet Union lost and the Cold War, big defeat for the elites of the world who are attempting to set up this managing system that would allow them to run the world, and the elites in this country, the elites in the socialist enclaves in western Europe they all have the same belief: You’re an idiot, too stupid, the little guy, you can’t do what is right and you can’t be trusted to do what is necessary to keep the elites elite, to keep them in power — and it’s really no more complicated than that. Let’s move on to the audio sound bites, Meet the Press yesterday, fill-in host “Andrea Mitchell, NBC News,” who’s talking to Leaky Leahy, Pat Leaky Leahy and Arlen Specter, and she said, “Senator Leahy, if there’s a real hard-liner nominee, would you support a filibuster?”
LEAHY: I would hope that we don’t meet that point. That’s why we’re going to meet with the, uh, errrr, president in about a week, going to urge that he would put somebody who would unite the country, not divide the country. Ah, if you had somebody on the extreme right, just as if you had somebody on the extreme left, that’s not going to unite the country, uh, and that’s going to bring about a fight in the Congress. I heard some senator say, “Well,uh, all he needs is 51 votes.” You know, when you stop to think about it, if you had a justice on the Supreme Court who only got 51 votes. That’s not a very good signal to the rest of the country.
RUSH: So there you have it. The filibuster is back. We told you this is going to happen. We told you this deal was going to be tested, and it will be tested. Fifty-one votes isn’t enough. Can’t confirm a Supreme Court justice, 51 votes, not when the Republicans are doing the nomination. If it were Ruth Bader Ginsburg with 51 votes or any of their liberal Democrat nominated judges, “Well, 51 votes would be fine,” but 51 votes is just not going to get it — and as such, Democratic senators “said Sunday a filibuster is one of the weapons in their arsenal when the time comes to vote on a nominee to replace Sandra Day O’Connor.
The comments came amid a lobbying campaign by conservative groups opposed to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as a potential successor to the influential O’Connor.” The comments came amid a lobbying campaign by the conservatives? What about People for the American Way? Who wrote this? Pete Yost of the AP. What about all the money the American left is spending out there on this idiotic campaign? Senator Joseph Biden said, “A filibuster is appropriate in certain circumstances.” On Face the Nation he said, “I have no intention of filibustering, but it depends on who the president sends.”
Sounds like you have an intention of filibustering. “I would hope that we don’t reach that point,” said Patrick Leahy, “but, you know, if you had somebody on the extreme right, just as you had somebody on the extreme left, that’s not going to unite the country, and that’s going to bring about a fight in the Congress.”
Uh, here we go again. Supreme Court nominations are not about “uniting the country.” Elections do that. Of course the whole notion of “a united country” is a sham anyway. The country united? About what when? It never is. There’s always a fight for the minds and the matters of the American people and it’s an ebb and a flow and it’s back and forth. There never is unity. But the last thing in this country that — go look at the founding documents. Go read the Federalist papers. Go read the Constitution. You will not find one reference to the Supreme Court existing to unify the country much less a single nominee to that court being used to unify the country. This is more arrogance from the left, assuming that the country is not unified simply because Bush won and is in office, and that’s why the country is not unified, and we have to make sure Bush doesn’t get the nominees he wants because that will “further” split the country.
Meanwhile, on the heels of this story by Pete Yost… “Filibuster on the Table in Court Fight” — Alan Eisner of Reuters writes, “Senators Call for Calm on US High Court Nominee.” Well, how can this be? Reuters says, “Senators Call for Calm;” AP says, “Filibuster on the Table in Court Fight.” Here is Eisner’s piece: “As conservative and liberal interest groups gear up for a bruising and expensive battle over the next Supreme Court nominee senior Republican and Democratic senators on Sunday pleaded for calm, calling on both sides to tone down the rhetoric. Both sides are preparing for a bloody political battle following the resignation of Justice O’Connor.”
Dubba… Dabba… It goes on talking about the money that’s going to be spent by these people. All weekend we hear from people like Ralph Neas of People for the American Way, and Nan Aron of the Alliance for Justice and other leaders of the Hollywood and George Soros-funded left win cabal, “insisting that President Bush nominate a mainstream conservative to the Supreme Court, or that he unite the nation with a “pragmatist or moderate in the character of Sandra Day O’Connor” — and as I say, folks, this is real ch-ch-chutzpah. I mean, these are the same people and groups that have conspired to undermine the president’s judicial appointments for over four years, and they now seek to derail any nominee to the court who isn’t a proven activist.
Ted Kennedy started all of this. We didn’t pick this fight. Conservatives did not pick this fight, but we have to win. It all began with that assault on Bork. Too many sat passively while it happened. President Clinton’s activist nominees Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer both sailed through the confirmation process. They were not smeared. Their video rental records were not combed through. Their trash cans weren’t searched.
Witnesses weren’t called to testify with phony stories about pubic hair on Coke cans but now is the time to put an end to this and the way to put an end to this is for the president to simply nominate somebody like Janice Rogers Brown who Biden said, “I will filibuster her,” but it’s time to send somebody like her or Bill Pryor. Send somebody up there and let’s get it on, because what’s happening, folks, the left is in the midst of its second-to-last stand or last stand on all this. Desperation has set in, and it is time once again to force the left to be who they are in front of the American people. They are who Dick Durbin was with his comments on G’itmo. It’s time to bring more of that to the surface. It’s time to nominate somebody that’s going to send these people into the tizzy like we have never seen so that they will identify themselves as who they are for the American people.
Get it on and bring about their own self-destruction. It’s not time to make deals with them. It’s not time to, you know, have summits and conferences with them; It’s not time to appease them. No matter what is done to the left, no matter how you try to give them what they want, it’s not going to stop their battle plan. It’s not going to stop the things they say. It’s not going to stop their operational mode. So you may as well take them on and sink them. Take them down the tubes. The president talked about political capital. He’s not running for anything anymore. If he’s concerned with a legacy let it be the legacy of the court — and that’s the important one anyway.
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RUSH: Yeah, we could use the Pat Leaky Leahy standard, ladies and gentlemen. If a Supreme Court nominee only gets 51 votes, that’s 51% of the Senate, that’s a majority in anybody’s book, that doesn’t unite the country. No, no, no. Fifty-one votes in the Senate for a Supreme Court nominee does not unite the country. But Bill Clinton getting 43% of the vote in 1992? Why, that was a mandate, damn it! I am tired of these people. I resent having to talk about these people every day; these people doing in but P me off. They’re bunch of losers, a bunch of people that lose their arrogance and their condescension just offends me, and it’s time it was dealt with. It is time these people understood once and for all that not only have they lost recent elections. They’re going to keep losing more. It’s time to finally do something to impress upon them that they lost, that they are losers — and that’s why I want this president to nominate somebody that’s just going to totally agitate them to no end, and I want that nominee to get confirmed. Something’s gotta drive the point home that these people lost and that they do not run the show.
I don’t care how many media allies they have, and I don’t care how many local news allies they have scattered and pock-marked all over the country, they still lost. They did everything they can for three years to defeat Janice Rogers Brown. She’s on the DC circuit. They lost. They put together this amalgamation of special interest groups to defame her and destroy her, and she is on the bench. They lost. Ditto Bill Pryor, ditto Priscilla Owen. It is time to keep this going. It’s almost getting to the point — I hate to say this, because you know, when I say something bores me, I don’t want to talk about it, but I’m getting to the point — this bores me. I’m getting to the point. Maybe it’s not boredom. Maybe it’s just sheer outright anger.
Whatever it is, but I’m fed up with it. I am fed up listening to these cocky, arrogant, blowhards act like they are king of this country, like they are some sort of elite royalty, all, from a guy who can barely walk after happy hour. Well, if the president will nominate somebody that will unite the country we’ll work with him on it. From somebody who’s the junior senator of New York who no matter what he does cannot stand out against Mrs. Rodham, Chuck Schumer, demanding a summit. Joe Biden — old Chia-head himself — failed presidential nominee, 1988, plagiarized Neil Kinnock and all that has to come forth, and say, “If it’s Janice Rogers Brown there will be a filibuster but I’m not thinking of filibusters.” Then we have to deal with Dick Durbin, comparing the US military and its various institutions to Pol Pot and all that rot. You know, you just get to the point where — I know how frustrating it is for you. It’s probably four or five times as frustrating for you because you all don’t have a microphone where you can come and tell everybody how to fix you. I do.
I at least get to vent and so forth, but even so — and then when you add to it stuff like this, then I really do a slow burn. This is a story from yesterday’s Washington Post. “Filibuster Deal Puts Democrats in Bind.” Oh, okay. “Pact may hinder efforts to block high court nominee.” You know what I say to that? That deal’s not going to stop them from filibustering anybody. The deal is not going to stop ’em. But, oh, the Washington Post so concerned, so concerned the filibustering deal puts Democrats in a bind! Oh, no! Can the country survive? The Democrats are in a bind! It’s only when the Democrats are in a bind. It’s only when the Democrats are bound and gagged that the country has a chance. But this whole notion, “Oh, no! Filibuster Deal Puts Democrats in Bind. Oh, no, oh, no! What’s to become of us?”
We are going to prosper finally. No better Democrat than one that’s bound and gagged. But in the midst of this figuratively speaking, political sense here, of course, you get — you go down to the third-to-last paragraph of the story here, Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter handling a similar question on the Meet the Press, said, “I wouldn’t say, ‘Are you gonna uphold Roe?’ but I would ask a nominee, ‘When you have a decision which has been in effect for decades, and people have come to rely upon it, what kind of circumstances, how extraordinary must they be to try to overturn it?'” Well, this is about Roe vs. Wade.
The question was, “You going to ask these nominees how they’re going to vote when overturning Roe comes up, if it does?” and then Specter said, “Well, I wouldn’t say, ‘Are you going to uphold Roe?’ but I’d say, ‘The country’s gotten used to something. You going to just overturn it without extraordinary circumstances?” I would love that question being asked of Roger Taney, who upheld slavery back in the Supreme Court — or Senator Specter to tell us what he thinks of overturning the Taney decision when it was overturned, because that Dred Scott decision just basically said that the United States has a right for people of color to be owned, that they were three-fifths of a person.
Should that have been overturned? Now, here’s the problem With Senator Specter’s attack on Bork and his view of settled law and precedent, a problem most liberals have. If this is the rule, then under his approach, Dred Scott would have been respected precedent by subsequent courts, as was Plessy vs. Ferguson, that was segregation, and other bad decisions. In fact, Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 is an example of the court reversing itself. They reversed Plessy in Brown vs. Board of Education and ending segregation in public schools. This is what it comes down to. The liberals support precedent when they like the result, and they support a living, breathing Constitution when they don’t like precedent and they want to impose their own views on the nation, and with Specter joining in on this, you know, it just takes the boil factor here above 212 degrees.