Another Reality Check

[This was meant to be a comment to a Blogs for Bush post. However, the comment wouldn't post, and so in order to avoid dumping the half-hour I put into it, I'm reproducing it here with a trackback.]

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{It would be better to catch them flat-footed on the Supreme Court with a nominee they can't lie about for 24 to 48 hours.}

Ain’t no such animal. Not this time.

And if there were, well, we’ve been down that route before, unless the name “David Souter” fails to ring a bell.

{[Janice Rogers Brown] is exempt from filibustering by the dems, since they found her not extreme according to the deal. Of course, the dems will still do it, but we will have an easier time defending our positions and nominee.}

I don’t see how. The stuffing of her nomination for all that time wasn’t a function of our ability to defend our positions and nominee, but our unwillingness to play political hardball (i.e. the Constitutional option).

{Bush 41 named the first black justice.}

Um, no, that was LBJ and Thurgood Marshall.

{I want a fight.}

Indeed. And I think we’ll get one. Just not one that ends up better than a stalemate.

{might be better to save the fight for when we're replacing ultra-leftist Ginsburg with a conservative.}

There’s no such thing as “saving the fight.” Understand that the Left is looking into the literal abyss. If they lose the SCOTUS, it is O-V-E-R for them. In their minds, this is like Winston Churchill standing alone against the onrushing Nazi hordes, and they are fully committed to “fighting us on the beaches, fighting us on the streets, fighting us in the fields…They shall never surrender!”

Remember also that they expended all that time, effort, and bile blocking a third of Bush’s appellate court selections for over four years. Given that baseline, what on Earth would make anybody believe that a fight over any SCOTUS seat can be deferred apart from a complete Republican capitulation?

This is sublimely simple, ladies and gents: if the President doesn’t let Harry Reid & Co. make his nomination for him, there’s going to be a fight. Ditto when Rehnquist steps down, and Ginsburg after him. The Democrats are not going to willingly allow ANY replacement who isn’t a philosophical clone of Ted Kennedy, regardless of the philosophical bent of the Justice taking his/her leave.

And so, we fight. And if our senators take the fight seriously, we win. If, on the other hand, they cut and run, then the SCOTUS will be gradually depopulated by attrition until President Hillary is sworn in, Republicans revert to Orrin Hatch mode, and she starts filling those vacancies.

Ultimately, the Democrats’ strategy is to run out the clock on Bush’s second term. And that brings us back to the “memo of understanding” and the McCain Seven, which nearly everybody seems to have forgotten.

If that doesn’t kill off your optimism, nothing will.