Bull Moose: "Buck Up, W."
If you haven't read the newest post from Marshall Wittman at The Bull Moose, I highly recommend it. "W is for Wimp?" urges the president to "reconnect with his inner Texan" and stand up to the "Justice Sunday" mob currently clamoring in opposition to a Gonzales nomination.
posted by JBD @ 11:06 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
What is really fascinating in the whole Gonzales discussion is the transformation of the AG in the eyes of the left. When nominated for Attorney General, there was lots of viewing with alarm that someone who wrote legal briefs suggesting that torture was permissible would become AG. Now, perhaps because the rabid right doesn't like him, he is held us as a shining example of what a Supreme Court justice should be?
What is wrong with this picture? Maybe Mr. Gonzales is the best that can be hoped for out of the Bush administration -- that is not the same as being a GOOD candidate for the Supreme Court.
My DNC sources and my own political instincts tell me that this really is a case of Gonzales being the best the left thinks its going to get. There has been some backing off of the terrorism memos because Gonzales did not actually write them. They were ghost written by a DoJ lawyer who is now a professor at Berkeley and a low level talking head (NYT likes to quote him). The rumor mill has implied that Gonzales personally preferred to go along with the pro-international law stance of the State Department’s lawyers but he caved to political pressure. It is the caving in that has got a lot of the left scared, they are worried that Gonzales will end up being dominated by Scalia. Personally, I think the opposite is more likely. So far, Scalia has shown no capacity to bring other justices to his side and instead has a good track record of pushing judges towards the left. I think Gonzales could end up like Kennedy, slightly right of center on economics and slightly left of center on social issues, but overall in the mainstream of public opinion.
Yes, that's exactly the problem. There is a Souter in Gonzales just waiting to get out.
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