Running out the Clock

Let's be frank; it wouldn't matter who Obama nominated, Republicans would have trashed them using most of the same arguments they've used against Sotomayor. And today's article from Ed Fuelner just underlines that. It's the old canard about using foreign law to settle American questions.

Just two years ago a book titled “The International Judge” featured an introduction she penned. “The question of how much we have to learn from foreign law and the international community when interpreting our Constitution,” she wrote, is “worth posing.”

Yep - because that means that when she's hearing cases on the Supreme Court she's just as likely to draw from the the French or Sudanese constitution as the American one.

Oh and get this, Judge Ginsberg said that Judges should be aware that other nations look at how we interpret laws. Horrors.

Of course neither of those quotes says that the justices involved will misinterpret the law based on foreign laws, unless you are already convinced that Justices Ginsberg and Sotomayor are already going to misinterpret the law. Rather they are just commenting on the world that judges live in; there are more laws then our own and there's nothing wrong and possible much good with being aware of that.

I find myself wondering if a liberal Justice said "I really like listening to Miles Davis in my chambers while I am writing my decisions; something about that music gets to me." if we'd read day after day of articles suggesting that this Justice was going to go to Miles Davis rather than the law or the constitution.

But the plus side is that Sotomayor is very likely to be our next justice, as Mike Madden notes in an article about the last day of hearings.

Four days of hearings demonstrated what everyone already knew about Sotomayor: She's obviously qualified, she's not remotely the radical activist the right says she is, and her appointment as the first Latina justice truly will make history. The only question left by the end of the day Thursday was exactly when the Senate would get around to making her confirmation official.

Lessons Learned

Here's the lesson Conservative Pundits would like Republicans to take away from this latest election - be more conservative. But that's pretty much the lesson they would like Republicans to take away from any experience. A Republican has some exceptionally good pancakes? The lesson is to be more conservative. A Republican has some crappy pancakes? The lesson is to be more conservative.

At any rate Ed Fuelner's latest article follows this trend, focusing on Government Spending.

"Money can't buy me love," the Beatles famously sang. That should be the lesson conservatives take from the Nov. 7 elections, because the real story of this year's midterm vote is that the supposedly conservative majority spent as if it was a liberal majority.

Interesting. Republicans were trying to bribe their voters, and the voters couldn't be bribed. Apparently.

Of course in this particular diagnosis of Republican Woes there's one name that's conspicuous by it's (near) absence. President Bush. This blind, deaf, and dumb congress abdicated it's responsibility to keep an eye on the Executive Branch, so they got to pay a bit of the bill for President Bush's failed policies in Iraq.

What's interesting is that the idea that our leaders aren't gods and need careful scrutiny and watching is, at heart, a Conservative idea. Trusting our leaders with now powers to surveil and imprison us is supposed to be something they aren't keen on. But this generation of Conservatives doesn't see things the same way as previous ones, apparently.