November 21, 2005
Remaking the Judge
By John
Leo
Folks, we're talking here with Terry Carville-Begala, the
famed political strategist. How goes the fight to trash Bush's Supreme
Court nominee, Sam Alito?
Well, it's just plain hard work, Geraldo. He's a normal Republican
pick, just as Breyer and Ginsburg were normal Democratic picks.
But when we get through with him, he'll look like Caligula.
How will you do that?
Well, we can't say he'll have women forced into back-alley abortions,
as Teddy did to Bork. That's considered crude today. Our model
is what Chuck Schumer did to Charles Pickering. The judge had
a segregationist past, then turned around and became a civil rights
hero. Charles Evers, Medgar's brother, said Pickering was one
of the men who helped break the Klan in Mississippi. But Schumer
played the old segregationist card brilliantly, and it worked.
You don't argue facts. You create impressions.
What impression for Alito?
That he's an ideologue who dislikes women. Our feminists are
already softening him up on the Pennsylvania spouse-notification
law. A few on our side say his vote put women's lives at risk
by insisting that violent husbands know about their wives' decisions
to abort. Not so, really. Wives would have been exempt from telling
husbands if they simply said they felt they would be put at risk.
But the feminist anger is genuine, and we have to build on that.
The New Yorker magazine has already kicked in by saying
that Alito's spousal-notification vote "suggests a view of
women and marriage that is, to put it gently, anachronistic."
Kind of stupid, I guess, but helpful. Alito applied Sandra Day
O'Connor's "undue burden" test pretty carefully, but
by the time the case got to the Supreme Court, O'Connor had changed
her mind. Guessing what O'Connor is going to think six months
from now is like trying to bring down a distant butterfly with
a boomerang. But again, it's a mistake to get hung up on facts.
Is he really a misogynist?
Nicholas von Hoffman, the columnist, called Alito "the bringer
of pain and tragedy into the lives of women." That's the
way to do it. People don't want to hear about evidentiary rules
and precedents. Our base mostly thinks judges just vote on social
policy, anyway. So if you reject a legal complaint from a female,
you're antiwoman. It's like a political campaign. If your opponent
voted against the Salute-the-Flag bill because of all the pork
attached, you ignore the pork and hammer your opponent as antiflag.
Will he overturn Roe v. Wade?
We have to be careful here. We depict him as a dull plodder who
reflexively defers to precedents and Supreme Court rulings instead
of voting his opinions. But that would be saying that he's unlikely
to overturn Roe, because it's settled law and he has
warned about the "shock" of reversing long-held Supreme
Court decisions. We may be able to work both halves of this, but
it won't be easy.
What other impressions are you working on?
Resentment over the strip search he would have allowed of a 10-year-old
girl.
Wasn't that a technical issue? It was a police raid on
a meth house. Police know that a dealer will often hide drugs
on other people, hoping that they won't be covered by the warrant.
The police put this argument in their affidavit asking for a warrant
to search everybody, but they screwed up and didn't get it explicitly
in the text of the warrant itself. Still, they felt they had made
their case, so they had a female officer search a woman and her
daughter. The officers argued that the information in the supporting
affidavit was incorporated by reference. Alito agreed. But does
this make him authoritarian and antichild?
It does if you want him to be seen as far to the right and out
of the mainstream. Look, thanks to Arlen Specter, who delayed
the hearings, we have two months to dig up and embellish old Alito
cases. By that time, he'll be antidisabled, antiminority, pretty
much anti-everything. Just watch.
You give fresh meaning to "advice and consent,"
Terry. Good luck.
Copyright
2005 John Leo
Distributed
by Universal Press Syndicate
