Partisan Wrangling And Supreme Courtship

The partisan wrangling over nominees to the Supreme Court is nothing new, think Ted Kennedy's rant at the Robert Bork confirmation hearings:

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens ..."

They even made a verb out of Robert Bork; this was one of the most ridiculously cruel examples of what many people on the Left anticipate from conservatives in response to any nominee that Obama chooses.

A lot of this is unfortunate, but some of it makes for good drama. In fact Christopher Buckley wrote a pretty funny/good novel about this exact issue called Supreme Courtship.

To the extent that conservatives blindly stonewall a reasonable nominee they are foolishly wasting the public's time and their own efforts. I would bet, though, that Obama will choose someone who fits into that "reasonable" mold, as I think Bush ultimately did with his two nominees (albeit not at first, Harriet Miers was a disastrous pick and he incurred a serious beating for that foolish episode). Obama is politically astute and he surely knows the vulnerability a president experiences with a political decision of this magnitude. I'm sure he won't want to squander his early popularity with a unapologetically political selection.

In response to reader JNM's comments I would strongly disagree with your contention that abortion and gay marriage have no bearing on the future of the country or the welfare of our people. These are two hugely divisive issues that many many Americans feel strongly about. To brazenly operate as if those opinions don't matter just because they may qualify as "movement conservatism" or antiquated, religiously-influenced opinions is not a politically viable strategy (though maybe in secular France...). Obama recognizes this, and in fact himself does not support gay marriage. As to the protection of abortion, Roe is a disgrace to Supreme Court jurisprudence. Most people I know who study law or have JDs feel this way. That doesn't mean that for many really compelling socio-political reasons abortion rights aren't necessary. It just means that abortion is so bitterly contentious in part because of the devastatingly flimsy legal justification established in Roe.

We live in a pluralistic society and I think its easy to forget the importance of the art of the compromise (and the potential resolution of complex and divisive problems through federalism). Obama has the rhetorical side of the art of compromise down pat. With his selection he can show us that he not only talks but also walks his above-politics approach to governing.