Let's Fight About Judges
EMERY, NOEMIE
Let's Fight About Judges If Bush takes on the left's hit squads, he'll have public opinion on his side. BY NOEMIE EMERY Faced with a Democratic Senate that obstinately blocks his judicial...
...The third leg of the stool is the liberty lobbies, keen to present themselves as valiant defenders of free thought and free speech from religious conservatives...
...In 1995 Jennifer Gratz, a white woman from a working-class background, was refused admission despite a glowing résumé and a grade point average of 3.7...
...Voters should be asked if they find its character assassination tactics appealing...
...Do Americans want their courts packed and paid for by Hollywood money...
...Those who say "no" will be a much larger number, and be likely to live in swing states...
...BY NOEMIE EMERY Faced with a Democratic Senate that obstinately blocks his judicial nominations, George W. Bush and his allies have two options: They can sit around and wait for the next blow to fall (meanwhile praying that Republicans recover control of the Senate in November...
...What are in the courts are a variety of obscenity cases and pornography cases...
...Following the first trimester of a pregnancy, 65 percent would make abortion illegal...
...When they say judicial nominees are "hostile" to "basic civil rights law," they don't mean the 14th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act of 1964...
...It is no surprise that they have focused their aim on the least democratic branch of the government...
...Polls also reveal squeamishness among people who call themselves pro-choice over what they consider "bad" reasons for abortions (convenience, gender preference, etc...
...easier to concentrate all one's forces on key points of pressure than to make one's case to the country at large...
...in the sixth month this number goes up 18 points...
...Three-fourths of the country tends to agree...
...that's where they've had their greatest successes...
...The evidence of her extremism...
...George W. Bush ran in 2000 partly against the cutthroat political culture of Washington, and he won the debates when Al Gore came across as too aggressive, too relentless, too uncivil...
...and "freedom of expression" means the most vulgar excesses of the entertainment industry...
...Its "long-term agenda" today makes for fairly strange reading: "fostering understanding among different segments of our society, and increasing the level and quality of public dialogue . . . our highest purpose is to nurture a national climate that encourages and enhances the human spirit, rather than one that divides people into hostile camps...
...a contrary Senate, Democratic, but barely (and because of a party switch, not an election...
...The most aggressive and successful of these in opposing judicial nominees is no longer the ACLU but People for the American Way...
...In August 2001, Gallup found pro-life and pro-choice sentiment at parity (46 per-cent-48 percent) for the first time in its history, a swing of 23 points in six years...
...And though some of these judges are actually libertarian-leaning conservatives (think Clarence Thomas), People for the American Way tends to oppose all conservative nominees without distinction, the "religious" and the "libertarian" alike...
...These are the people who want the loosest possible limits on what can be seen, sung, and sold...
...People for the American Way can be opposed in the same way—as too politically bloodthirsty for the tastes of the American public...
...It suggests that many doctors, like many members of the American public, have grown more doubtful as the activism of the '70s has ebbed...
...Lavishly funded—including, as National Review's Byron York tells us, by media organizations such as the New York Times—People for the American Way and its allies have earmarked large sums of money for deployment in the nominee wars...
...Courts, to be sure, are supposed to read the law, not the latest Gallup poll...
...They see a group of extremely rich people and corporations who make a great deal of money selling sex and violence, often to children, and who want to make sure that their business is protected, that there is always a ready audience at hand...
...After the 2000 election, said one House Democratic strategist, 'the moderate members . . . became absolutely convinced . . . that a national message would hurt them, that the gun control issue had killed them, and that abortion hurt them significantly.'" The political tactic to draw from this is clear: The liberal judicial hit squads' agenda is the Democrats' national message, and one that the party's candidates should be grilled on repeatedly...
...This is a startling number, considering that in two older studies, one in 1971 and another in 1985, 88 percent of ob-gyns expressed support...
...To them, "women's rights" is code for unfettered abortion...
...Georgia's renegade Democratic senator Zell Miller has said that the decision to block Charles Pickering's nomination to the federal bench by tarring him as racist will probably cost the Democrats the governorship of Mississippi, and hurt them elsewhere in the South...
...They want judges who will protect this interest...
...When most people hear the words "freedom of speech," they tend to think of political speech, the right to criticize leaders and government...
...Dionne noted recently in the Washington Post, "In the House, southern and rural Democrats fear national party messages that would be too liberal for their districts...
...Support for abortion has been steadily falling, despite the still-fervent support of the press...
...Those they should fight are the liberal hit squads that geared up in 1987 at the Robert Bork hearings, found their stride four years later in the ThomasHill circus, sat out the eight Clinton years, and came roaring back earlier this year in the confirmation hearings for Judge Charles Pickering, whose nomination to the court of appeals was choked off in the Judiciary Committee, before a floor vote...
...Or they can fight back...
...This is a fight the White House should pick...
...The power these groups wield now is largely a product of circumstance: a Republican president elected, but barely...
...After this, however, support sharply falls off...
...So far, so good, but, as it turned out, for blacks, whites, Hispanics, and Asians, the numbers were treated differently...
...When they say a judge like Charles Pickering—who defied the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in the late 1960s and sent his children to integrated public schools in that state—is not reliable on civil rights matters, they mean he might rule against programs like Michigan's...
...Typical of what they support is the admissions scheme put in place in 1995 by the University of Michigan, which plotted the grades of its applicants on a grid that combined SAT scores and high school averages...
...The liberal hit squads form an iron triangle: the feminist left, the once-respected but now exclusively partisan civil rights groups, and the moral and sexual libertarians —People for the American Way, founded in and by Hollywood in 1980 to fight the religious right, and the more venerable American Civil Liberties Union...
...What the feminist left wants is not merely a country that permits abortion in some circumstances, but one that promotes abortion, supports it, and funds it with taxpayers' money...
...Do Americans really like the idea that their 14-year-old daughter should be allowed to get an abortion behind their backs...
...But with left- and right-wing screeds high on the bestseller lists, with the political shout shows thriving on cable, with Saturday Night Live lauded everywhere for making vicious fun of our leaders, this right does not seem in great danger...
...These are the people and companies that drive parents crazy, who make them feel that the culture itself is their enemy...
...A student with an SAT score of 900 and a grade average of 3.0 stood an 89 percent chance of acceptance if black, an 86 percent chance if Hispanic, and a 4 or 5 percent chance if Asian or white...
...they mean hostile to programs like Michigan's...
...They fear such judges for a very good reason—namely, that programs like Michigan's are arguably a violation of "basic civil rights law" and therefore are rightly endangered by judges who care about the meaning of the law...
...These groups sell themselves as supporting all things bright and lovely: women's rights, civil rights, free Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...There are a surprisingly large number of ob-gyns who don't do abortion for the simple reason that they don't believe in it," she noted...
...The case should not be hard to make...
...It may hurt them too in the other "red" states: the places that liked Bush already in the 2000 election, and now like him even better...
...Those who say "yes" will be a fairly small number, and most will be in the Democrats' camp...
...According to the New York Times, abortion rights lobbies plan a head-on assault on another Bush nominee, Judge Priscilla Owen, for showing "the most extreme hostility to abortion rights of any of the nominees...
...These are issues in which PFAW's deep-pockets contributors have an enormous material interest...
...The bad news is that these groups are filthy rich and fiercely determined...
...To abortion rights lobbies, however, there are no bad reasons for a woman ever to choose, and no abortion is ever too late...
...easier to move one committee than to move the whole Congress...
...to link all of these to the national Democrats...
...In its own eyes (and its pamphleteering and direct mail), People for the American Way is an alliance of actors, artists, and activists banded together to oppose and resist the many attempts at repression and bigotry that come from the right wing and the churches...
...to shine a fierce light on their interests and tactics...
...This, of course, is the same group that soon went nuclear against nominees it opposed, scanning video rentals for signs of perversion, trolling for rumors about private behavior, and indulging in the same forms of guilt-by-association that gave McCarthyism its bad name...
...These groups tend to win by throwing up roadblocks, and thwarting the popular will...
...and make sure they all are held politically accountable...
...a Judiciary Committee that is therefore 10-9 Democratic (and all liberal Democrats...
...Lawsuits like these motivate the liberal civil rights activists...
...Consider abortion: Polls show 91 percent of the American people think abortion should be legal when a woman's life or health is in danger...
...The president and his conservative allies can therefore take a leaf from the interest groups' playbooks, and portray them, accurately, as "extreme" and "outside the mainstream...
...Funding People for the American Way are such groups as the major motion picture studios, the TV cable networks, the Internet companies that have opened new vistas in sex exploitation, and the major purveyors of the sort of rap music that glorifies murder and rape...
...Most of the Senate seats up for grabs in the 2002 cycle are in the red states...
...She is suing the school...
...85 percent would not make it illegal in cases of incest or rape...
...The good news is that they are extreme—extremely extreme—and the reason for the ferocity of their assault on Republican judicial nominees is their failure to muster support for their policy goals anywhere except among liberal judges...
...civil rights" is code for quotas...
...expression...
...Their ends are to keep from the federal bench any judge who might moderate or amend their agenda, and their means have been frequently harrowing...
...The answer will likely be "no...
...Abortion rights activists' favorite tactic in judicial fights is to warn that small groups of extremists are trying to frustrate the will of the people by placing restraints on abortion—an ironic complaint given that Roe v. Wade itself was a power grab of historic proportions by a small group of judges...
...The time has now come to make them the issue...
...But they are badly out of step with American public opinion...
...In the Washington Post magazine earlier this year, Liza Mundy reported that abortion providers are dwindling in number, because more and more doctors do not want to do them, or to work in practices that do...
...For them, "civil rights" now means preserving admissions preferences like Michigan's...
...As E.J...
...But conservatives shouldn't shrink from confrontation for fear of the polls...
...We are alarmed that some of the current voices of stridence and division may replace those of reason and unity," ran PFAW's founding mission statement in 1981...
...Support for unrestricted abortion rights is an extreme, out-of-the-mainstream position...
...She supports parental notification for teenaged girls seeking abortions...
...When they say conservatives will not protect civil rights "gains," they mean programs like Michigan's that engage in racial favoritism...
...It is easier to block one judge or one bureaucrat than to elect someone to state or to national office...
...Hers is one of a number of lawsuits now making their way through the courts...
...Similarly, what the civil rights lobby wants is to override the principle of equal treatment under the law and to build instead a race-conscious culture, with a foundation of quotas and set-asides that allow outcomes to be tweaked until they seem equal and rewards to be distributed by elites who decide what each group "deserves...
...and smaller majorities support some form of access in the earliest months of pregnancy...
...Do they like the idea of their children trolling the Internet for smut...
...Roughly one-third [told researchers from the Kaiser Family Foundation] they are 'personally opposed' to the procedure...
...And to most Americans, "civil rights" still means equal treatment under the law...
...Their critics see them quite differently...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 34
