The furor created by the post election remarks of Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter, after achieving a fifth U.S. Senate term, has opened a wound in the Republican Party.
Conservatives are still furious over the fact that the president, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and Pennsylvania’s junior senator, Rick Santorum, saved this donkey in elephant clothes from sure defeat in the GOP primary when he was challenged by former congressman Pat Toomey.
It was thought, falsely, that Bush could ride Specter’s liberal coattails to victory in the Keystone State. By the time the GOP establishment got through dressing up this imposter to face his conservative primary challenger, you would have thought Specter was Mother Theresa incarnate, not a tool of the abortion and homosexual-rights lobbies.
Specter is no ordinary RINO Republican. Under the “old boy-girl” system in place in the Senate Republican Conference, he is next in line to become chairman of the Judiciary committee, through which every nominee to the federal bench must pass.
Specter has spent the bulk of this week trying to recast his giddy victory remarks, which were an unvarnished warning to the president not to send up any nominees who fail to view abortion as the sacrament.
However, one must remember that – even now – Specter has not promised to support the president’s choices. Far from it. All he has promised is that Bush’s nominees will receive a hearing and a vote, and that they will be treated fairly – like Robert Bork, no doubt!
Specter is reminding us that he defended the nomination of Clarence Thomas. Yes, and he has spent the balance of his political career apologizing for it! If William Rehnquist steps down from the Supreme Court and Bush nominates Thomas for chief justice, you will see just how far Specter’s support goes.
One must not forget that, as chairman of the Judiciary committee, Specter will control the committee staff (conservatives will go), the flow of material and background checks. He easily can manipulate the process.
Calls have been coming in all week to Majority Leader Frist and Judiciary committee members urging them to pass over Specter and choose Jon Kyle of Arizona to head the committee or to lift the conference-imposed term-limit on committee chairman and allow Orin Hatch to remain at his post.
However, it is important to remember that every GOP senator has a say in this process because, at the end of the day, the entire conference must approve or reject the committee’s choice. The decision made on Mr. Specter will tell us if these senators are truly men and women of principle or simply showboats.
It is easy to talk about the importance of having men and women on the federal bench who will follow the law, not make it. It is easy to talk about the importance of having justices who will strictly interpret the Constitution, not rewrite it to conform to the latest politically correct trends. It’s easy to talk about the importance of maintaining the separation of powers. It is much harder to go to the mat to defend these principles and the process of selecting these jurists, not allowing it to be hijacked as it was in the last Congress.
The easy thing for these GOP senators would be to simply take a chance and “trust” Mr. Specter to do the right thing in order to retain the “old boy-girl” promotion system that guarantees that, if they run in place and keep getting re-elected, they, too, can become powerful committee chairmen. Under the current system, merit has nothing to do with it. All they have to do is keep breathing and fooling the public.
Specter, in an effort to save his position, now is saying he would not attempt to impose a “litmus test” on judicial nominees. This is the same Arlen Specter who says that Roe vs. Wade, a decision based on world-is-flat technology, is “inviolate.”
Having Arlen Specter as chairman of the Judiciary committee is a chance we simply cannot afford to let them take. The stakes are far too high!
Specter and his liberal friends see the Constitution as a “living instrument” to be shaped by judges, hand-picked to impose left-wing ideology, which they never could get through Congress
If this philosophy prevails, it will be the fault of timid GOP senators and their leaders, who squandered the victory achieved in this election by making Specter the gatekeeper to the courts.
