Boycott Vermont!
HEWITT, HUGH
Boycott Vermont! . . . until Patrick Leahy allows votes on Bush's judges. BY HUGH HEWITT BOYCOTTS don't always work, but they usually annoy. Maybe it's time to annoy Vermont and its two senators,...
...And it ends up we just get publicity for Vermont and more people end up coming here...
...But that's Leahy: Any smoke will do when the public's attention turns to his antics...
...They are annoyed...
...That decision is the job of the Senate—the entire Senate...
...That is, of course, what Leahy is doing, but he and his allies prefer that it not be put so bluntly...
...Vermont's Jim Jeffords did Leahy no favor when, on the anniversary of his defection from the GoP, he pointed to Leahy in the Hugh Hewitt is a nationally syndicated talk show host and a columnist for World NetDaily...
...This is only a one-man blockade, but it's working...
...Those are unhappy hostelries...
...I have been careful to argue that trips to Vermont should be planned as soon as hearings and committee votes take place on the original eight nominees held hostage these 55 weeks...
...If a well-qualified nominee failed in committee or on the floor, it wouldn't be Vermont's fault...
...When I proposed this payback on the air and online last month, a few hundred people decided to act on the idea and dispatched notice of their decision to bypass Vermont to various hoteliers and the Vermont Chamber of Commerce (www.vtchamber.com...
...I think I'll say no to Vermont this year...
...Eight of President Bush's original eleven nominees to the federal bench have not been given so much as a hearing by Leahy, despite the fact that individually and as a group they represent the very best in American legal learning, practice, and thought...
...Under fire on the anniversary of the first nominations, Leahy took to the floor of the Senate to defend his tactics...
...Leahy would not be the chairman with the power to obstruct all the nominees if Jeffords had not switched parties...
...But they may also be annoyed...
...They may support him...
...And FDR sent the plan to Congress in 1937, four full years before he became a "wartime" president...
...Perhaps they will study the specifics of Leahy's atrocious actions...
...When I played the audio for Arizona Republican senator Jon Kyl, also on the Judiciary Committee, he laughed and laughed...
...This is very different from demanding that nominees be confirmed...
...It's not going to have an impact...
...Both are from Vermont...
...In the meantime, though, perhaps the good people of Vermont should learn that their senators' behavior is not without its costs...
...We get about 5 million in the summer and fall, and 250-300 is really a drop in the bucket...
...Senator Leahy agreed: "As everybody has said, this happens every year on one issue or another...
...Two hundred and fifty boycott e-mails is really nothing significant...
...He referred to another popular wartime president, FDR, and how FDR had tried to pack the courts...
...Maybe it's time to annoy Vermont and its two senators, Patrick Leahy and James Jeffords, to get across how little the obstruction of judicial confirmations is appreciated...
...Leahy argued that his effort was like the successful effort to block FDR's court-packing plan...
...The cumulative economic effect of saying no to Vermont is probably quite low...
...Rarely is accountability so clear in a matter of legislative obstructionism...
...Vermont depends on out-of-staters' coming to its small preserve, in the summer months to hike and in the winter months to ski...
...Perhaps they will get a clue as to why, as the New Republic's Michael Crowley has written at length, Leahy is unpopular within the Senate, even with some of his Democratic colleagues...
...We get 8 mil- , lion to 8.5 million visitors every ' ; year...
...As former solicitor general charles Fried said on my radio show in June, Leahy is denying these nominees their hearing not because they are unqualified, but because they are overwhelmingly qualified and would win the approval of the committee and the senate...
...FDR's court-packing plan proposed a radical expansion of the Supreme Court, not the filling of existing vacancies by highly qualified nominees...
...Leahy raised the stakes recently by directing his staff to demand internal Department of Justice memos from the days when one nominee, Miguel Estrada, toiled as a deputy solicitor general...
...senator Leahy holds the chairmanship of the senate's Judiciary committee, a position he has abused from the moment he assumed it...
...But the conduct of Vermont's two senators surely is Vermont's fault...
...Just as Leahy has said no to the nominees whose timely service might improve the circumstances in my state of California...
...It's targeted at Senator Leahy V and it's all wrapped around the judicial nominations," Chris Barbieri of the Chamber told Burlington's Channel 3. Barbieri allowed as how the Chamber had received 250 emails from individuals declining to go to Vermont this year...
...The Chamber's flack and the tourism industry would be well advised to let Senator Leahy know their opinion on the matter...
...But Vermont's senators are preventing courts that affect all 50 states from having their full complement of judges...
...He was not impressed...
...He's a bully, and an arrogant one at that...
...After all, what's the harm in holding hearings on the president's nominees and allowing the senators to vote them up or down...
...The administration will never release such material, so Leahy will have a new excuse for delay in his war against the nominees...
...crowd of well-wishers and remarked that he "slept better knowing that Pat Leahy is picking the judges...
...Which is really the point behind a Vermont boycott—turning attention to Leahy's tactics...
...Genuine relief will arrive only if the GoP recaptures control of the Senate in the fall...
...This power in one senator's hands is obviously unconstitutional...
...The stonewalling of the original eight Bush nominees has become a huge issue for the GOP base, and perhaps even beyond as the profile of the issue rises...
...But some of the public is letting individual hotels, B&Bs, and ski resorts know why they won't be checking in this summer and fall...
...Why spend money in a state that has so directly injured your interests in a functioning judiciary...
...So many wrote, it seems, that notice was taken, though abruptly dismissed...
Vol. 7 • July 2002 • No. 41
