Democrats Smear Alito Whats The Point - Road to the Middle Class

WHY DO THEY do it? Why are national politicians like Senators Kennedy and Schumer descending to cheap attacks and witness baiting in the hearings to confirm Judge Samuel A. Alito to a seat on the United States Supreme Court? Are they crazy?

It is common in political controversy to represent the other side as idiots. Private people often call politicians they disagree with as fools.

But this is a mistake. Politicians are not fools, even if they often act like it. National politicians like Kennedy and Schumer, who led the attack on Judge Alito in the confirmation hearings this week, are not fools. They are highly successful national politicians who have won state-wide campaigns time and time again. These are smart, successful people.

So why do they turn the Alito confirmation hearings into a playground brawl?

Is it because it worked in the Bork hearings, and almost worked in the Thomas hearings? That�s what Rush Limbaugh suggests when he says that Democrats are calling plays out of a 30-year-old playbook. It worked in the past, and so the Democrats will keep using it until the Republicans intercept a couple of passes for touchdowns.

Is it because the Democrats want to keep their base on a permanent war footing? That seems to have been their tactics ever since the election of 2000. But you wonder whether that is really paying off for them. When you keep your base on a war footing, it also keeps the opposing base on a war footing. Democrats are enraging Republicans just as much as they are encouraging their Daily Kos and MoveOn.org enthusiasts.

Are they just going through the motions for the left-wing groups like People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice? Ralph Neas and Nan Aron run these liberal activist groups for what appears to be the sole purpose of promoting liberal judges for the federal bench and opposing conservative judges. But surely the Democratic senators have the power to say to Neas and Aron: cool it.

You have to hope that the Democrats are looking at polls that show that their slash-and-burn tactics are backfiring.

You�d like the tactics to backfire because you�d like to live in an America where a judicial candidate could tell the Senate Judiciary Committee: �Yes, Senator. I�m a pretty conservative guy: Two kids, two cars. One wife. But I�m not going to go onto the Supreme Court and reverse every liberal court decision of the past 50 years. That�s just not the way the law works.�

Senator Biden complained this week that the confirmation hearings were turning into a sham where the nominee wouldn�t tell the senators anything about his views. Well, senator, that couldn�t be because Democrats on the Judiciary Committee, ever since the Bork hearing in 1987, have tried to lynch any nominee that expresses a political view that liberals dislike, could it?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

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Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

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“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

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I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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