Friday, July 01, 2005
The coming confirmation bloodbath
You undoubtedly know by now that Sandra Day O'Connor has resigned. Much smarter people than I will be discussing this ad infinitum, so I am only going to weigh in to point you to the smarter stuff I see. In any case, the confirmation fight is going to be bruising, if for no other reason than we now have established partisan organizations that exist for no other purpose than to wage these confirmation battles. Volokh's Zywicki:
This wretched distillation of judicial confirmations into partisan struggles is the foul residue of Roe v. Wade. I strongly support lawful abortion, but it is a great shame that it was imposed by the Supreme Court.
Reading the tea leaves, it seems clear that there will be a brutal confirmation battle regardless of who is nominated. At this point, a confirmation battle will be supply-side driven--the interest groups have the money already, and they are going to spend it one way or the other. And then try to raise some more. And the politicians are going to try to raise money by pandering to these same players. No one is going to roll over on either side just because a particular nominee is thought to be "moderate" rather than "conservative".
The credentials or qualifications of the particular nominee under consideration will be largely beside the point.
This wretched distillation of judicial confirmations into partisan struggles is the foul residue of Roe v. Wade. I strongly support lawful abortion, but it is a great shame that it was imposed by the Supreme Court.
1 Comments:
By 
geoffrobinson, at
Fri Jul 01, 10:23:00 PM:
Although I view abortion as murder, I strongly appreciate how you can separate your view on a matter versus how it should be ajudicated.
I would support having a Marxist guerilla nominated to the Court if he was an originalist.
