Townhall.com
January 31, 2006
By Curt A. Levey
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Faced with the opportunity to prove their independence from ultra-liberal interest groups, Senate Democrats struck out Tuesday when they voted almost unanimously against the confirmation of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Come November, Democrats will bear the cost at the polls.
While half of the Democrats in the Senate gave the nod to Chief Justice John Roberts, all but a few decided to vote their party affiliation--and not their conscience--this time around. In a further show of partisanship, Democrats engineered a week-long delay in the Alito vote in violation of a promise and then mounted a last-minute filibuster attempt. All the while, they were following the hard-line script written by the coalition of liberal groups that orchestrated much of the fight in the Senate against the president's judicial nominees. These groups are a powerful part of the Democrats' base, but their out-of-the-mainstream views and hyperbolic claims wound up hindering the effort to stop Alito and will be an albatross on the reelection efforts of Democratic senators from moderate and conservative states.
Led by People for the American Way (PFAW) and organized under the banner of the Coalition for a Fair and Independent Judiciary, the anti-Alito groups include the ACLU, NOW, NARAL and MoveOn.org among others. For these organizations, there are no more important issues to move on to. Their far-left political and legal agendas have long depended on activist judges to provide what the democratic process will not. Moreover, having struck out on Roberts, their credibility with donors and the media was on the line.. No wonder they called in all the chits owed by Democratic senators.
The subservience of Senate Democrats to this coalition was demonstrated most clearly in November 2003, when memos prepared by Democratic Judiciary Committee staffers were disclosed. Those memos revealed that these same organizations were choosing which of the president's appeals court nominees Democratic senators would block. One group even orchestrated a confirmation delay to manipulate the outcome of the biggest affirmative action case of the decade, a case to which the group was a party. Now, two years later, one need only look at the Alito hearings and floor debate where Democratic senators closely followed coalition members' talking points to see that the liberal interest groups are still calling the shots.
At a time when Democrats are trying hard to appeal to mainstream America, it does them no good to be tied at the hip to organizations increasingly understood to represent the fringes of American values and law. For example, while mainstream America embraces religion, coalition members have fought to delete "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance and have tried to rid schools of Christmas carols and Easter vacation. These groups are also at the forefront of lawsuits pushing redefinition of traditional marriage. Some members have even argued that anti-polygamy laws are unconstitutional.
Coalition groups have fought efforts to protect children from Internet pornography, and some have contended that child pornography is protected by the First Amendment. Members have led the efforts to defend blatant preferences for minorities and to give drivers licenses to illegal aliens, while fighting deportation of aliens convicted of crimes. And these organizations are often hostile to the War on Terror, opposing American involvement in Afghanistan and even comparing President Bush to Hitler.
Despite this disparate collection of causes, coalition members are united by the knowledge that their views can be enacted only by a liberal, activist judiciary. Given that Democrats' hopes of stopping Alito and Roberts rested on painting them as extreme, the choice of allies whose views can make almost anyone look mainstream by comparison was a poor one. The contrast worsened when the hearings showed the public that both men, while conservative, are solidly mainstream.
The thinking of many Democrats appears stuck in decades past, when this same coalition defeated Robert Bork and almost borked Clarence Thomas. But times have changed. Groups have emerged to counter the liberal spin, and Americans have had almost 20 years to learn about the coalition's agenda and its tactics of distortion and hyperbole. What they've learned may spell trouble for Democrats at the polls.
Democrats' electoral prospects were not harmed by the battle over John Roberts, because moderate Senate Democrats largely showed their independence from coalition fanatics by voting for the nominee. However, the coalition's successful demand for all-out partisanship against Alito hurt Democratic senators from red states and swing states.
When historians write about the confirmation of President Bush's nominees to the Supreme Court, part of the story will surely be the failure of Senate Democrats to foresee that it would be their interest group allies, rather than the president's conservative nominees, who would be viewed as extreme. By choosing to side with those groups to the bitter end, moderate Democrats have ensured that this failure will also haunt them at the polls.
Mr. Levey is General Counsel of the Committee for Justice, which defends and promotes constitutionalist judicial nominees.