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Alito's Confirmation Signifies Sea Change in Supreme Court Barry Farber She's blonde, good-looking, brilliant (MBA), with energy enough to exhaust the whole National Football League early in the season – and she can't keep a job more than three days.
By her third day on the job she feels sufficiently empowered to charge into the boss' office and say, "Look, if you REALLY wanted to run this place right ...," followed by a bill of particulars of defects that need amending. She's the kind of person who, if she ever went to work for Ford, would immediately get fired for making Cadillacs.
I once asked her why she carried on like that and she replied: "I know. I know it's self-destructive, but I just can't help myself." Story Continues Below
It took the second day of the Alito hearings for me to understand.
Almost as annoying as "If you really wanted to run this place right ..." is "You're missing the point. You're missing the WHOLE point!"
And now it's I who can't help myself. That's what I've got to say to all of you. If anybody else grasps the real point playing out in and around that hearing, I haven't heard it or read it.
First, understand that the confirmation of Judge Samuel Alito would be the lightning-and-thunder inauguration of the biggest sea change in American politics in the past half-century. It would signal the first solid conservative majority on the Supreme Court since it really didn't matter the way it does now. What's maddening to most Democrats at the moment is the pitiful lack of public interest or understanding of the Supreme Court and its importance.
Everybody grasps the importance of the presidency. And Congress, most Americans understand, makes the laws. The Supreme Court, however, hangs up there where the elephants make love. More Americans could probably name the eleven starting players, offense and defense, on eleven footballs teams than could name even five of the nine justices of the Supreme Court. The presidency belongs to us all. Congress belongs to us all. The Supreme Court, however, is the private property of us ACEs (Active Concerned Elitists).
And yes, Virginia, the Supreme Court DOES "legislate from the bench." And yes, their rulings have for a long time been consistently joy-giving to the left side of our American brotherhood. And yes, when Judge Alito is sworn in, a new flag will fly atop Mount Suribachi.
And the left is not just vexed, upset, discommoded, frustrated – they're panicked. Any leftist in America who isn't panicked at this moment doesn't understand the problem.
What else but panic can explain all that phony frenzy of the Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee because of Judge Alito's possible once-upon-a-time membership in an organization of Princeton alumni purported to dislike minorities? A dump truck of evidence that he's no bigot turns that molehill into a pro-Alito mountain.
The New York Times' lead editorial on January 11 protests the intentions of seven current and former federal judges to testify for Alito as follows: "Their planned testimony does not appear to violate judicial canons, but it brushes up against them!" (Emphasis and exclamation point mine.) The attempted assault on Judge Alito's ownership of stock in the Vanguard fund also started out weak and gradually tapered off.
On Wednesday morning, January 12, the whole panel of CNN commentators dismissed the entire anti-Alito bundle in terms more scathing than mine. That's the North Carolina equivalent of getting bitten by your own dog.
A wise man once said, "If you can cause forty-eight dishes to be broken by tripping one waitress, you owe it to the world." Likewise, if you see an analogy to anything as important as the composition of the Supreme Court, you owe it to the world to put the two parts side by side. Here it is.
America's liberal Democrats have an awful lot in common with the Iraqi Sunnis. The Sunnis wielded great power under Saddam Hussein. Their status fell with his statue. All the strife inside the now-forming New Iraq owes to the panic of the Sunnis, fearing that what they inflicted on the rest of the Iraqi population during Hussein's long rule will now be inflicted on them.
Liberal Democrats now fear that, with Judge Alito's confirmation, the right will suddenly be able to do unto the left what the left has been doing unto the right for fifty years: letting judges "legislate from the bench."
The Iraqi Sunnis don't feel that they raped, exploited, abused or otherwise mistreated other Iraqis during Saddam Hussein's regime. Over time, that came to seem what was due them. Sharks don't think they're worth making movies about. They're just having lunch.
I'd like to offer some therapy for liberal Democrats at this time. Don't suppose that, with Alito's confirmation, we will "do unto you what you've been doing unto us." There are such things as Supreme Court justices who will open-mindedly rule case by case. Come on, now, Dems. I can think of two relatively recent Supreme Court justices appointed by conservative presidents who turned out to be bundles of joy to liberals (Souter and Kennedy). Can you name any disappointments in the opposite direction? I can't. All the way back. Ever!
I had a girlfriend one time who couldn't understand the difference between me saying "You're a Hitler Youth" and "You're ACTING like a Hitler Youth."
Please don't let your balance fail you, now. I'm NOT saying the panicky liberals are Nazis. I'm merely saying that I'm reminded of an incident at the end of World War II in which a Gestapo officer was captured by American forces in Austria as he was in the act of trying to capture and execute an American OSS officer. The Nazi raised his hands and pleaded, "Please don't harm my family."
"HARM your FAMILY," said the American with the rifle pointed at him. "What do you thing we are, NAZIS?"
This may be pumped-up team spirit on my part that I may later have to apologize for. Nonetheless, at the moment I want to say to the liberals fearful of conservative bullying in the reshaping Supreme Court, "Who do you think we are, LIBERALS?!" P.S.: Mrs. Alito's tearful exit from the hearing room was either lucky or brilliant, depending on whether it was natural and organic or "staged." It will redound mightily to the judge's favor.
One last analogy, please. The effect of galvanizing public sympathy behind Alito by "not being able to take it anymore" reminds me of that earlier hearing in 1953 when attorney Joseph Welch silenced Sen. Joe McCarthy by saying to his face, "Senator, have you no shame?" Editor's note:
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