LET'S GET SERIOUS: ALITO

Now there's a serious matter I should address, which is that of Judge (can't wait to call him Justice) Alito. I thought that the folks at Red State this morning did a nice job of explaining what's at stake in the Alito confirmation process. This whole notion that ideology is a permissible basis to determine whether a judicial candidate is fit for the bench must be instantly, and finally, quashed. Certainly, it is fair during the Senate vetting process to determine whether a Supreme Court candidate is "mainstream," which should be something more along the line of a determinaiton of whether the judge (sorry, Harriet) will rule based on whether he thinks his cat Snoodles thinks Miranda is good precedent, or whether he thinks the Constitution was written by Smurfs in 1534. Anyway, you get the idea.

The Democrats, of course, have subverted this legitimate assessment by questioning whether a judge is mainstream on the grounds of whether he is "too extreme," which in their world is synonymous with conservative. Mainly, if a judge seems liable to overturn Roe, that judge's fitness for duty on the nation's highest court is as questionable as if Nazi paraphinelia and a can of gasloline were discovered in the back of his Ford F-150. As a side note, this also leads me to the question of, if Roe is supposedly so untouchable, such sound legal reasoning, why are Democrats worried about it being jettisoned by every potential Republican Supreme Court nominee? Notice that no Democratic Senators seem particularly worried about any potential high court member overturning, say, Brown v. Board.

Whatever the case, the judicial nomination process should be free of litmus tests based on a candidate's political ideology, and this rule goes for both sides. Republicans are less guilty in their track record for of nixing candidates on ideological grounds, given that they recently gave the okay to liberal Justices Breyer and Ginsburg, but even fellow travelers of the right can admit that should the Republicans lose power in the White House and Senate in the near future, they'd jump at the first opportunity to use an ideological litmus test to thwart the liberal nominees of Hillary Clinton - no, I didn't say that!! - or whatever Democrat was in the White House.

The Founding Fathers have already made it clear how justices should be chosen for the Court based on what those dead white men didn't say. Note that the Constitution has no ideological criteria set forth for the president's nominees to the Supreme Court, because the Founders recognized that the people would have a say-so into who assumed the seats on the High Court based on who the voters put into power. I say this to either side: if you want to decide what the Supreme Court looks like then win elections. Phony vetting criteria described as picking "mainstream" candidates should not be used by the Democrats as a pretext for acheiving in the Senate what they increasingly cannot accomplish at the ballot box.

All of this is why the Alito confirmation process is so vital. It is time for the Republicans to take a stand against the Democrats, liberals, progressives, Deaniacs, whatever you want to call them, in their long-standing effort to hold America politically hostage by winning through judicial fiat what they cannot accomplish at the polls. If the Democrats win this fight on ideological grounds, all of the years of the Reagan Revolution and Republican majority-building might as well have never occurred and will be about as relevant as those little blue men that live in huts while Roe and like precedent will remain our reality.