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I'm sure this isn't the news the Republicans wanted to hear, so soon in Obama's first term. Those of you on the red column were probably hoping that the Justices all took their vitamins and drew immense satisfaction and enjoyment from their job. Sorry. Cheer up, though. You got two justices, one of which, despite his relatively young years, was able to level up to Chief Justice. Guess he slew a dragon. Those provide plenty of XP. We have the Roberts court for the time being, and likely will continue to have it until Roberts stops playing or runs out of HP.
Either way, Bush, the Republicans, and everybody else on the right got their constitutionally mandated influence on the courts. Hell, with the exception of Clinton's couple, Breyer and Ginsberg, There are no Democratic Party appointees.
But what do I hear out from the Republican Pundits and so many others? The courts are packed with liberals!
Actually, the opposite is true. The Republicans have gotten their way on selections, and how.
Republicans have done an excellent job of getting conservatives appointed to the bench. There problem might, ironically enough, be that their judges just aren't activist enough. The dictates of the party were never the only obligations, or even the strongest obligations for judges in their courts.
For those impatient with the fact that the Judges haven't cooperated in destroying the old liberal order, the obvious call at this point would be to resist whatever liberal judges Obama appoints. Obstruction worked so well in all the other branches, why not here?
I'd tell Republicans, sympathetically, don't try it. If you're serious about influencing the choice, obstruction will only end up costing you your influence on who gets selected. This is especially true after last week's reversal of fortune, which illustrates why a party shouldn't tell people to get lost unless they truly can afford to see them go.
The Republican game in recent times has been seeing just how much support they can lose and still govern a country. They've found out in the last two elections: not much. Their quest for purity, in party politics if nowhere else, is part of what brought them down. Although Republicans count their lucky stars that there only a couple of moderate Republicans left, they should recount, since their losses of moderates have left them a part of social extremes, one where the members don't dare to compromise with the Democrats and Liberals on big ticket items, lest they be primaried, like Specter was going to be.
The trick is, the Republicans ended up driving many of their moderates to the other party, leaving them with not enough voters to maintain their majorities.
And now, it's on the verge of guaranteeing them a more liberal judge than they might otherwise get.
How does this work? Well, the Republicans tell the Democrats to get lost, and the Democrats disregard the Republican's opinion because there's no use reasoning with them. They'll just reject whetever candidates they deem reasonable. The strong likelihood will be that the Democrats will have 60 seats by October, and that's about the time Obama will want Souter replaced.
The question now is one of results, and how they can be achieved. You can count out getting another Alito or Roberts through, for obvious reasons, so the pure result is already out. The other pure result, the naming of a relatively strong liberal, after the Republicans start showing "the audacity of nope" once again and get shut out by the Democrats, should be considered undesirable by practical conservatives.
The alternative is involvement without the expectation of control. Accept that at this time, the best that you can do is influence the situation and understand that doing your best is nothing to be ashamed of. The folks in Congress aren't there to look good, they're there to represent their constituents. Purist Republicans have insisted this means perpetually pushing the ideology, but I've got an alternative to their largely symbolic partisanship: knowing that you may not win every battle, nor get everything you want, you still try and see what you can get. You negotiate compromises, you become a practical aid to good policymaking, you reach across the aisle, and you make sure that Democrats don't do much business that you're not in there, moderating, offering practical suggestions, and so on and so forth.
It could work, if certain constituents and a number of the dominant Republican special interests would let it work. Thirty years of being ascendant, then dominant, have left many on the Right unrealistic about how the political process works when you're neither popular, nor powerful enough to truly cut others out. They don't realize that they are on the free hanging portion of the branch that they are sawing through.
They don't have to get more liberal. I'm not even sure we have a name yet for what Republicans must change into to thrive in this political environment. But on issues like Supreme Court appointments, the Republicans must realize that the first change they must make are those necessary to get people to seek out their advice, their wisdom, and their support again. Which means, for the first time in a long time, Republicans have to consider how to be persuasive and admired by those other than just their own inner circle of pundits and true believers.
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