With events having brought Douglas Kmiec home from Malta, how about the next vacancy on the Supreme Court for the traditional Catholic and constitutional scholar who presciently supported the President who has delivered the most pro-life measure since the Hyde Amendment was passed by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by Jimmy Carter? It will be the most pro-life measure until the superior House Bill is revived to combine the public option with the Stupak-Pitts Amendment, thereby rendering abortion not just vastly less likely, as when the Senate Bill is combined with the Obama-supporting Bob Casey's Pregnant Women Support Act, but practically impossible, the PWSA and other soundly left-wing economic measures having in any case eradicated most or all reasons why anyone might feel the need to have an abortion.
Or will Obama make sure that he does not miss the same trick twice and nominate a white Evangelical Protestant in the tradition of William Jennings Bryan? The Republican Party has never made the slightest effort to limit abortion; although Hyde himself was not only a Republican but almost a sort of European Catholic monarchist, still it took a Democratic Congress and a Democratic President to enact his ban on the federal funding of abortion. The GOP is in any case now being fought over by an East Coast Establishment and a Tea Party equally uninterested either in that issue or in the definition of marriage. And, not unrelatedly, the Republican Party has never attempted to appoint a white Evangelical to the Supreme Court. Ronald Reagan managed to put both Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony Kennedy on that Bench. Obama really does not need to try too hard in order to do better than that.
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If only WJB, a brilliant advocate, had been appointed to the Supreme Court.
ReplyDeleteExactly. How many socially conservative Republicans remember when the libertarian Right was spearheading the drive to legalize abortion as part of its “get the government out of our lives” crusade while many of the leaders of the labor and Civil Rights movements were spearheading opposition to that same legalization drive?
ReplyDeleteRonald Reagan’s rhetorical flip on that issue helped to cause this amnesia, but when you look at his record as Governor of California the truth is plain for everyone to see.