Hurricanes As Pesky Distractions

While most of the Extreme Left is busily trying to assassinate President Bush's character over the response to Hurricane Katrina, there are a few of those jackals who are publicly resenting the inconvenience and colossal effrontery of the category-5 storm's timing in distracting from their own attempt to assassinate the character of SCOTUS nominee John Roberts (via NRO Bench Memos):

But as they scramble to rally grass-roots supporters in the days before the confirmation hearings and the month before the Senate is expected to vote, some opposition groups worried that their efforts had failed to pierce the din of concerns about rising gasoline prices, casualties in Iraq, and, most recently, the hurricane devastation in New Orleans.

"Now there is this hurricane," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. In exasperation, Ms. Smeal suggested Thursday that the Senate Judiciary Committee should postpone the confirmation hearings, scheduled to begin Tuesday, because the hurricane was distracting attention from debate on the nomination. "This has got to get more visibility," Ms. Smeal said. "We have to do something."

Imagine that - Eleanor Smeal thinks that smearing Judge Roberts is more important than bringing relief and rescue to the survivors of Katrina. And they have the f'ing nerve to accuse Dubya of callousness (among other things)?

But the Robertsphobes, er, "soldier" on anyway. 160 of them, purporting to be "law professors," have submitted a much balleyhooed letter opposing his Olympian appointment. And as you might have expected, there is very little of substance within it:

The letter is quite unimpressive. It is utterly partisan, and badly distorts and misreads nearly every source or item to which it refers. That newspapers are reporting the story as "160 law professors sign letter opposing Roberts," without noting that many of those signing the letter have no expertise at all in constitutional law, and that a congregation of 160 professors is, as Jon notes, surprisingly small, reflects badly on the coverage. The real story here is that 160 law professors — very few of whom are experts in the matters discussed in the letter — have signed their names to what purports to be a statement by disinterested scholars but is really a cut-and-paste job of the People for the American Way's talking points.

The most prominent of these thirteen dozen or so law professors are Erwin Chemerinsky of Duke, who appears weekly as the "on the left" half of Hugh Hewitt's "smart guys" segment and who, according to Ed Whelan, has yet to actually sign this letter; and Peter Edelman of Georgetown, who floated the Marxian assertion back in 1987 that there was a constitutional right to a "minimum income" - a trial balloon that cost him a 1994 appointment to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, courtesy of George Will (here's the peroration):

One result of this argument is the obliteration of the very concept of privacy: All of life is permeated by government action, therefore all of life is government's responsibility. Another result is an unlimited license for the judiciary to disregard the results of representative government. Edelman's argument, at once childishly naive and breathtakingly arrogant, is: We know how government could end severe deprivation, but government is beholden to a benighted public, so the Supreme Court must order Congress to take remedial measures that lack public support.…

Here, then, is contemporary liberalism in crystalline clarity: American society is savagely unjust; it is so because the majority, which has the knowledge and means to make things right, will not; therefore the majority is immoral; therefore majority rule is immoral and rule by an enlightened judiciary is obligatory. If liberals wonder why their label has become an epithet, they should note the vigor with which liberalism libels America. . . .

[Edelman’s] zest for judicial decrees to supplement or even supplant legislative policy-making, and his corollary contempt for representative institutions, makes him an exemplar of contemporary American authoritarianism.

It is these "American autocrats" that are defaming the President of the United States over hurricane relief and trying to keep off the Supreme Court a man who is universally acknowledged as the most qualified individual ever nominated to its ranks for no other reason than that he does not share their enthusiasm for legalistic fascism.

All I can say is, Republicans had better be prepared to fight when the Roberts hearings begin this coming week. Their continued Senate majority (such as it is) is very much riding on it.