WASHINGTON, March 7 (UPI) -- The Bush White House has a judicial nomination strategy; but does it have a confirmation strategy? The administration's loew key response to the rejection of U.S. District Court Judge Charles Pickering at the hands of Sen. Pat Leahy, D-Vt., and others on the Senate Judiciary Committee raises doubts. Does the White House have a secret plan to see its judicial nominees confirmed?
The liberal Democrats in the Senate, singing from the score composed by Ralph Neas, People for the American Way, the National Organization for Women and other leftist interest groups, are playing hardball politics.
As the blocking of Judge Pickering's nomination showed, the orchestrated campaign against selected Bush nominees has nothing to do with legal qualifications or judicial philosophy. It's all about raw, ugly politics, savage personal attacks, race-baiting, guilt by association, innuendo, half-truths, and all the other smarmy tactics the Borking brigade has honed to perfection.
Against this political version of Murder Inc., a supine administration appears impotent. It's true the Bush team has done a yeoman's work on nominations, having sent up a record number to the Senate. But if the White House has a political strategy to break through the partisan deadlock in the Senate, then it is keeping it well out of view.
Few actions a president takes have more lasting influence than his judicial appointments. A two-term president is able to shape the character of the federal judiciary for an entire generation. President Bush, however, disappointed many of his allies in the confirmation wars when he failed even to mention the issue in his State of the Union address. The administration seems to be relying on a strategy of relegating hapless nominees to the tender mercies of Patrick Leahy and his political meat grinder -- and hope for the best.
Meanwhile, highly qualified nominees are being savaged mercilessly by the likes of Sen. Leahy and his allies.
President Bush is engaged in an important, and what has turned out to be a bitterly partisan fight. But it is a fight that must be fought. Much is at stake. Few things threaten representative government more than a runaway judiciary. Increasingly in our society, largely unaccountable judges rule as an un-elected oligarchy.
Over the past 30 years, these judges have become the chief architects of social policy. In the process, they have hijacked the Constitution and subverted our system of self-government. Along the way they have formulated bad policies, which have eroded the sanctity of life, undermined marriage and the family, driven religion from the public square, invented bizarre new rights, and grotesquely distorted the First Amendment.
In contrast to the judicial activists who make law from the bench and substitute their own judgment for that of elected legislative bodies, such Bush nominees as Charles Pickering have demonstrated an admirable willingness to exercise judicial restraint. Such judges do not make law or invent new rights. Rather, they interpret the law and Constitution in accordance with the clear meaning of the text and the framers' intent.
For more than three decades, the left has manipulated the law to achieve its political ends, bypassing elected legislative bodies and dragooning activist judges into doing the liberals' ideological bidding. Nothing less than the survival of self-government, the people's right to rule themselves, is at stake in the battle over President Bush's judicial nominations.
The left certainly understands how much is at stake. This is why its declared unrestricted warfare against the conservative judges President Bush has nominated. The left sees this battle as its ideological Armageddon. If the left loses its grip on the federal courts, it will also lose the ability to impose its radical agenda on an unwilling America. The left will do anything to prevent this, as Charles Pickering has learned.
The silence of the Bush administration before this week is troubling. It suggests either that the White House has no strategy to counter the left's vicious attacks, or it is unwilling to fight for its nominees out of fear of appearing partisan or some other too clever calculation. Yet the administration cannot cede to Sen. Leahy and his leftist cronies the terms of the debate or the criteria for Senate confirmations. The lynching of Charles Pickering clearly was intended to send a signal and lay the groundwork for the kind of treatment President Bush's Supreme Court nominees can expect. The administration must not let this outrage go unchallenged.
(Kenneth L. Connor is an attorney and president of Family Research Council)
