My boss just pointed something out to me a few hours ago. The most liberal justice on the Supreme Court, John Paul Stevens, was appointed by Gerald Ford. That is, the most left-wing member of the USSC is a moderate Republican.
Consider that. Consider the footprint left on modern society by the Reagan and George HW Bush judges already. Consider the incredible damage George W. Bush has already done with a pet legislature, and how much more he could do with a pet court.
So my question is, where is the hope in our current situation?
Sandra Day O'Connor will be replaced by a conservative. That conservative will very likely be a rabid right winger in the Antonin Scalia mode. We know this. We know that even the consensus picks that Harry Reid has proposed would be far to our right. And, as we've seen in the filibuster fight, we know that our Democratic representatives really do not have the fortitude needed to mount an opposition campaign effective enough to even get these moderate Republicans onto the court. We can't even trust our party to handle damage control effectively.
Some of you are getting angry right now. Fine. But consider this: how far do you trust your Democratic representatives? I mean really trust them. Do you trust them to represent your values when it comes to labor, the environment, social justice, encouraging peace in the world, and promoting racial or gender equality? Can you point to a piece of action any of them has seriously fought for any time over the last 10-- or even 15-- years that would seriously promote any of these issues?
Talk to a member of the Democratic establishment about these things and you may get sympathy at best. You will most likely get indifference, or a lecture about how "real Americans" don't care about those things. The one thing you will NOT get is action. The Democrats have learned fear and caution, and they have allowed those lessons to overwhelm every other aspect of their strategy. At a time when Grover Norquist can compare the estate tax to the Holocaust, or Karl Rove can claim liberals didn't really feel 9/11, we're expected to attack people like Senator Durbin who actually tell the truth about what's going on in this country for being "inappropriate". We've gotten to a point where appropriate political discourse is whatever the Republicans say it is.
The Democrats will base their opposition to the Supreme Court nominee on abortion, their old mainstay. This is the issue they use to oppose virtually every Republican action on the courts. An uninformed person might think that Roe v. Wade was the most weighty issue facing the nation-- that we are not currently operating a torture camp in the Caribbean, kidnapping foreign nationals, holding citizens without trial, exporting exploitative labor practices, or making it easier to pollute the planet. One would think that this was the simpler time of the 1990s, and our biggest concern was the status of the President's genitalia.
Of course, the Democrats have failed to get any victory on the court system thus far. They have, as they so cravenly yelled only a few months ago, confirmed 98% of Bush's nominees without a serious challenge. They have chosen to allow two more to poison the system as part of a "compromise" (and we will see just how effective that compromise is the moment the Democrats attempt to actually use the filibuster in this major battle). The Democrats will continue to talk about abortion-- an issue that makes most Americans very uncomfortable-- while the really effective modes of opposition will fall by the wayside. Torture, human rights, labor rights, environmental quality, freedom of speech and thought, security in one's privacy. These are the issues that make the Supreme Court nomination important, and the GOP will therefore try to make them unacceptable topics of conversation. And the Democrats will play by those rules.
So we'll make our flash mobs, we'll blog, we'll write, we'll march, we'll protest. But what's the point? Democratic liberals-- the people who make up the vast bulk of the 49% of Americans who voted for John Kerry-- basically have no genuine political representation anymore. We have people who take our brand name and pretend to speak for us, but how much good are they doing?
I think that we are going to be screwed-- not to mention ignored-- until the current Democratic leadership is gone. They'll lose elections, they'll retire, and the really power hungry ones will stay on as emaciated Strom Thurmond-esque zombies until they die in office. But until they're gone, the party and the country will stay stuck in this Republican low gear. We'll continue to drift into a society that doesn't care about equality, justice, or sustainability. We will get weaker, poorer, less free, and less equal, but without an opposition party-- and with a hard right court-- how can we stop it? I'm starting to think that this is not an ideology issue, but a generational issue. The current leadership has learned to be scared and amoral. America can do better, and this party can do better. But not with people like Reid and Kerry in charge.