The Democrats "Whig" Out: Chucky Nixon

Stick a fork in the Democrat party - they're finished. They're done. They've passed their expiration date like green, hairy 2% milk.

Sound pre-mature? Over-confident? Triumphalist? Well, perhaps. But the apocalyptically, comprehensively horrible performance of the minority contingent of the Senate Judiciary Committee in this weeks confirmation hearings on the Supreme Court nomination of Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Alito is such a maximally public watershed moment of shark-jumping that it's difficult for me not to conclude that, far from the one-time party of Jefferson and Madison making a comeback, this week's circus was its Rubiconic death rattle.

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Let's take each Donk senator in turn - the gangsta ones, anyway.

CHARLES SCHUMER

Chucky lectured Judge Alito on Monday that he could not refuse to answer questions because of his fifteen-year long record of appellate court opinions. Back in September he told the same thing to Chief Justice Roberts on the grounds that he lacked a long record of appellate court opinions. (In fact, Judge Alito answered 98% of the questions directed to him, better than the 89% of Chief Justice Roberts or the 79% of Justice Ruth Buzzy Ginsberg; the Democrats just didn't like his answers because he refused to conform to their scurrilous, Snidely Whiplashian cartoon caricature of him)

Which raises an interesting point: the "stealth" strategy of selecting SCOTUS judges is predicated on the notion of giving the Democrats as small a target as possible. Yet here comes Sam Alito and his fifteen years of appellate court opinions, and the only case they really made a major stink about was the one about a ten-year-old girl getting strip searched (the Groody case), and they grossly distorted Judge Alito's opinion in the process to make him out to be a pervert. There has been a a smattering of questions relating to his judicial record here and there, all of them forgettable and none of them taking precedence over the fusillade of innuendo, smears, and personal attacks. Yet I thought Schumer himself declared five years ago that ideology was going to be the measuring stick for Dem consideration of Bush judicial selections. So tell me again why the President should be reluctant to send up equally tenured and outstanding conservative jurists like Michael Luttig and Michael McConnell?

The emblematic moment for Chucky came when he spent his thirty minutes Tuesday trying to all but beat the abortion answer he wanted out of Judge Alito:

CHUCKY : "Judge Alito, in '85 you wrote that the Constitution - and these are your words - does not protect the right to an abortion, and you said to Senator Specter a long time ago. I think it was about 9:30 this morning, 9:45, that those words accurately reflected your views at the time. Now, let me ask you, do they accurately reflect your view today?"

ALITO: It was an accurate statement of my views at the time, that was in 1985, and I made it from my vantage point as an attorney in the solicitor general's office, but it was an expression of what I thought at that time. If the issue were to come before me as a judge, if I'm confirmed, and if this issue were to come up, the first question that would have to be addressed is the question of stare decisis, which I discussed earlier, and it's a very important doctrine, and that was the starting point and the ending point of the joint opinion in Casey - and then if I were to get beyond that, if the court were to get beyond the issue of stare decisis, then I would have to go through the whole judicial decision-making process before reaching a conclusion.

CHUCKY: But, sir, I am not asking you about stare decisis. I'm not asking you about cases. I'm asking you about this. The United States Constitution.

ALITO: The answer to the question is that I would address that issue in accordance with the judicial process as I understand it, and as I have practiced it. That's the only way I can answer that question.

What we have here is a failure to communicate. Both men were speaking English, but neither were speaking the same language. Schumer is asking his question like a panelist in a presidential debate - he wants to know Alito's personal opinion on abortion because his default assumption is that of course Alito will legislate from the bench, only from the Right, so of course he has the right to demand that Alito disclose his view. Judge Alito, on the other hand, being a constitutionalist, has no intention of legislating from the bench, and accordingly answers the question as the conservative jurist he is.

If Schumer had any ability to get his mind around this dichotomy, he would have dropped that line of attack and moved on to something else. But liberal Democrats are the ultimate solipsists; they are incapable of believing that the world and the people in it might exist in reality as something outside the narrow, prejudiced prism through which they view it. So Chucky wouldn't drop it. And Judge Alito took him deep:

ALITO: And, senator, I would make up my mind on that question, if I got to it, if I got past the issue of stare decisis, after going through the whole process that I've described, I would need to know the case that is before me, and I would have to consider the arguments, and they might be different arguments from the arguments that were available in 1985....

CHUCKY: Judge Alito, does the Constitution protect the right to free speech?"

ALITO: Certainly it does.

CHUCKY: Well, why can't you answer that - the question of does the Constitution protect the right to an abortion the same way, without talking about stare decisis, without talking about cases, et cetera?

ALITO: Because answering the question of whether the Constitution provides a right to free speech is simply responding to whether there is language in the First Amendment that says that the freedom of speech and freedom of the press can't be abridged. Asking about the issue of abortion has to do with the interpretation of certain provisions of the Constitution. [emphasis added]

The non-diplomatic version? "It says 'freedom of speech' in the Constitution; it does not say 'abortion,' you ferret-faced twit."

No matter how much the Donks want to turn Alito into a politician, he's still a judge. And that is part & parcel of why they haven't been able to lay a glove on him.

Chucky took his hacks at Judge Alito's brief membership in the Concerned Alumni of Princeton organization and its supposed "sexism" and "racism" stemming from its conservative orientation and the writings of one former member after he had left the group. But given that Schumer began his political rise as a New York State Assemblyman in 1974 by virtue of an overtly racist scheme that he created and sold to a naive neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York (ridding their area of black people), and is currently trying to smear, through his DSSC "plumbers," Maryland GOP senate candidate Michael Steele, his credibility on race matters is nil.

In that he is a reflection of his brain-dead, obsolete party.

And this is just the appetizer. Next we turn to the Princeton schitzophrenic himself, Lower Slower Joe Biden.