Amid the uproar over the possible responsibility of White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales in the abuse of many "enemy combatants," a substantial consensus on the need for congressional rules to govern the detention of such people is quietly emerging among experts, including moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, and even some strong libertarians.
Consultation. Conciliation. Compromise. Such concepts are in eclipse these days in Washington. Everyone is getting ready for the mother of all confirmation battles. As soon as one of the nine aging Supreme Court justices retires, sports fans expect, President Bush will pick a clone of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas. Liberal groups will "Bork" the nominee as a retrograde, right-wing judicial activist bent on forcing women into back-alley abortions, pushing gays back into the closet, resegregating higher education, imposing a fundamentalist Christian theocracy, and promiscuously paving the habitats of endangered species. And then there will be all of the oppo dirt-digging for ethical lapses, libidinous excesses, and other embarrassments.
Veteran Washington superlobbyist Tom Korologos, now ambassador to Belgium, had some pithy words of wisdom for past Republican Supreme Court nominees whom he helped shepherd through the process: "Your role is that of a bridegroom at a wedding. Stay out of the way, be on time, and keep your mouth shut."
President Bush is keeping confidential his short list of possible nominees should one or more Supreme Court justices retire. But in conversations with former White House officials and others, the same names keep coming up. Brief biographies of 10 of them follow, very roughly in order of their prominence in the Supreme Court succession speculation game.
The 35-year-old debate about affirmative action in university admissions has often focused on whether the supposed benefits to black and Hispanic students justify the costs to whites and Asians who lose out, and the resulting racial divisions and resentments.
A lot of liberals, and a lot of conservatives, think that President Bush is speaking in code when he says he would nominate to the Supreme Court "strict constructionists" who would "faithfully interpret the law, not legislate from the bench."
White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales is an amiable man with an inspiring personal story. One of eight children of uneducated Mexican-American immigrants, he grew up in a Texas house with no hot water or telephone. He would be the first Hispanic attorney general. He has the complete trust of the president, whom he has loyally served for four years in Washington, and in Texas before that. He is far less divisive and confrontational than the departing John Ashcroft.
My last column explored some reasons for the bitter liberal-conservative polarization of our political class, which has helped spawn the anger, mendacity, and emotionalism that make our politics so ugly. Here I explain how the Supreme Court and the media have made this polarization worse, and sketch possible remedies.
The air is thick with lies, deceptions, distortions, demagoguery, sleaze, and vicious rhetoric, uttered every day by President Bush, John Kerry, or their surrogates. Both candidates offer evasion and snake-oil non-remedies for dire national problems, ranging from the existential threat of nuclear terrorism, to the war in Iraq, to global warming, to the looming Social-Security-Medicare-deficit disaster. And each campaign is whipping its most partisan supporters into a frenzy of hatred for the opposing party.
Liberal and conservative interest groups see Supreme Court appointments as a president’s most important domestic legacy. So now they are in their quadrennial lather about how Republican appointees could swing the closely balanced Court decisively to the right, and how Democratic appointees could swing it to the left, especially on big social issues that include abortion rights, affirmative action, gay rights, and religion.
