The murder of Dr. George Tiller yesterday in the middle of Sunday services at his church in Kansas has been generally deplored by people on all sides of the abortion issue (some rather less convincingly than others). But it’s time to come to grips with the fact that violence against abortion providers is always a strong possibility, and is very likely to get worse.
While it’s not right to hold anti-abortion activists generally responsible for such acts of violence, there is no getting around what Damon Linker, an expert on the Cultural Right, calls the “radicalizing logic of pro-life rhetoric:”

If abortion truly is what the pro-life movement says it is — if it is the infliction of deadly violence against an innocent and defenseless human being — then doesn’t morality demand that pro-lifers act in any way they can to stop this violence? I mean, if I believed that a guy working in an office down the street was murdering innocent and defenseless human beings every day, and the governing authorities repeatedly refused to intervene on behalf of the victims, I might feel compelled to do something about it, perhaps even something unreasonable and irresponsible. Wouldn’t you?
This is the radicalizing logic of pro-life rhetoric.

I’d go a little further than Linker here. It’s important to remember that to sincere hard-core right-to-lifers, we are currently living in the moral equivalent to the Third Reich, happily conducting an annual Holocaust of murder; abortion clinics are death camps; Obama is Hitler; the Democratic Party is the Nazi Party; anti-abortion activists are the German Confessing Church or The Resistance; most Americans are either Nazis or complicit by laziness in monstrous evil. And if I shared their core premise that a fetus at any stage of development and under any circumstance is equivalent to a Jew being herded onto trains and sent to Auschwitz, and if I could somehow ignore the whole issue of the wishes and interests of that fetus’ mother, I’d probably feel the same way–pretty violently.
There’s a tendency of many pro-choice Americans to deny this “radicalizing logic,” in favor of dismissive theories that people who say they oppose abortion in all cases are just lying, or are hypocrites, or are misogynists, or are just culturally reactionary, or are terrified by sexuality. Some of them may be all these things, but there’s no reason to believe that many of these people aren’t sincere in their position on fetal life, and on the goal of ending legalized abortion as the alpha and omega of their own civic life. And so long as that is true, there will always be a significant risk of violence, particularly right now, when it’s beginning to sink in that the tantalizing possibility of overturning Roe v. Wade through Republican Supreme Court appointments is receding into the far distance.
But aside from efforts to brush away anti-abortion activists as yesterday’s news, there’s another misconception that must be addressed in the wake of Tiller’s murder: the idea that a “compromise” on abortion policy that eliminates “controversial” abortions like those performed by Tiller will make the risk of violence–yea, even the conflicts over abortion–go away. That is dangerous nonsense.
To anyone who really takes seriously the belief that (as articulated in the Republican National Convention Platform of 2008) “life begins at conception” and should be protected by law from that point, there is literally no difference in moral quality between the late-term abortions performed (where justified by health concerns) by George Tiller and any other abortion at any stage of pregnancy. And indeed, from that point of view, a woman taking a Plan B pill, if she has actually conceived (according to a very strict definition of that term), is just as much a “murderer” as Tiller, and just as deserving of violent intervention on her “victim’s” behalf, or of punishment. The only real difference is that Tiller, like every other abortion provider on the planet, is a “mass murderer,” so stopping him–by legal or illegal means–is relatively more justified and will have a more salutory effect.
But “compromising” to outlaw “disturbing” abortions like those performed by Tiller just eliminates one mass murderer among many hundreds, from the serious RTL perspective. And the whole focus on relatively rare late-term abortions or on very rare intact dilation and extraction procedures–a.k.a. “partial-birth” abortions–by anti-abortionists is just tactical propaganda aimed at the mushy middle of abortion opinion. Demonizing George Tiller as opposed to any other “mass murderer,” or for that matter, waving fetus posters, is simply intended to create a “wedge” whereby the population is “educated” in the direction of opposing abortions generally.
So for pro-choice Americans, regardless of their exact position on abortion, the idea that “compromise” can end violence or even “end the culture wars” over abortion is completely illusory and arguably immoral, if you believe that women should generally have first and final say over their own pregnancies. Sacrificing fundamental rights on the altar of phony “compromises” is, by most standards, both immoral and ineffective, as Americans learned in the long run-up to the Civil War.
So what is to be done about the risk of violence? Ann Friedman at The American Prospect suggests today that the Justice Department reactivate a task force on violence against health care providers that was created under the Clinton administration but shelved under Bush.
That makes sense. It also makes sense to pay anti-abortion activists the respect of taking seriously their radical views, and even of defending their right to express them in ways that don’t threaten or intimidate, much less shoot and kill, abortion providers or the women who have every right to obtain their services. The “radicalizing logic” of the the right-to-life movement isn’t going away and can’t be abetted short of surrender. We all need to learn to live with that reality, and try to keep the peace as best we can.

There’s a nasty undertone to much of the opposition to Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court that she is what some people call a “diversity hire”: someone selected for a position to achieve a certain demographic balance in a particular work-place, regardless of qualifications. We are led to believe that such extraneous factors weren’t considered when the 106 white men (out of 110 total appointments) who have served on the Court were selected.
But as legal journalist Jeffrey Toobin explains in The New Yorker today, there have always been “diversity” factors heavily influence Supreme Court appointments, dating back to the Court’s very beginnings:

In the early days of the republic, when regional disputes were the foremost conflict of the era, nominees were generally defined by their home turfs. So Presidents came to honor an informal tradition of preserving a New England seat, a Virginia seat, a Pennsylvania seat, and a New York seat on the Court. In the nineteenth century, as a torrent of European immigrants transformed American society, religious differences took on a new significance, and Presidents used Supreme Court appointments to recognize the new arrivals’ growing power. In 1836, Andrew Jackson made Roger B. Taney the first occupant of what became known as the Catholic seat on the Court, and that tradition carried forward intermittently for more than a century, with Edward White, Joseph McKenna, Pierce Butler, Frank Murphy, and William J. Brennan, Jr., occupying the chair. In 1916, Woodrow Wilson nominated Louis D. Brandeis, establishing the Jewish seat, which later went, with brief overlapping periods, to Benjamin N. Cardozo, Felix Frankfurter, and Abe Fortas.

In other words, the “diversity” considerations that affected the Court’s composition evolved over time, and are still evolving, as women and African-Americans have finally achieved representation. Meanwhile, some of the factors that used to matter don’t any more, as today’s increasingly Catholic SCOTUS (Sotomayor will make it six of nine) illustrates. It’s unlikely that when John Paul Stevens retires, people will take of the need to maintain the “Protestant seat” on the Court.
But the fact that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnicity affected her appointment to the Court makes her part of a very old story, Toobin reminds us:

Earlier Presidents didn’t apologize for preserving the geographic balance, and this one need not be reluctant to acknowledge that Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic group, who by 2050 will represent a third of the American people, deserve a place at this most exclusive table for nine. (Nor, of course, did he note that the nomination was in part to satisfy Hispanic voters—the electoral benefit being another constant among Presidents.) As Barack Obama knows better than most, it is a sign of a mature and healthy society when the best of formerly excluded groups have the opportunity to earn their way to the top.

Indeed, “mature and healthy” minds don’t immediately jump to the conclusion that a Hispanic woman must be disqualified for service on the Supreme Court, other than as a “diversity hire.”

One of the settled rituals of the Republican Party is to refer constantly and almost exclusively to Ronald Reagan as the lodestar of conservative ideology, communications and governance. It’s gotten to the point where you half-expect a Republican audience to quickly bow heads at every mention of his name, like some Christians do at church when Jesus is mentioned.
But for all the hagiography, memories of Reagan’s actual career are sometimes hazy or inaccurate, and don’t offer a lot of specific guidance for political strategy, other than “optimism” and “winning.” That’s why Noemie Emery’s long article in The Weekly Standard , offering Reagan’s pre-presidential politics between his unsuccessful 1976 primary bid and his victory in 1980 as a template for today’s Republicans, is of particular interest.
The parallels between the Republicans of 1977 and those of 2009 noted by Emery are pretty obvious. They’d just lost two straight national elections after a period of great optimism about their ability to create an enduring majority. They’d lost the White House after holding it for eight years, and were in a weak minority position in both Houses of Congress. Emery doesn’t mention this, but they were also in the shadow of a intensely disliked former president, though the Ford interregnum had helped put Nixon in the past. And there were all sorts of messy intraparty disputes that had been simmering for a while.
She does not, however, mention (beyond an exaggeration of Carter’s political luster upon taking office) some dynamics about the temporarily-ascendant Democrats of 1977 that aren’t necessarily paralleled today. Carter had very nearly lost the 1976 election to Gerald Ford after holding a huge early lead. His election was heavily dependent on winning southern states reacting to his “historic” candidacy as the first Deep South nominee since the Civil War–states that no knowledgeable observer expected to remain in the Democratic column in future elections. The ideological “sorting out” of the two parties that began in the 1960s was well under way, a development that offered nothing but grief to the ideologically diverse Democrats in the short term. And Democrats had controlled both Houses of Congress for twenty consecutive years.
It’s also probably not a stretch to observe that Jimmy Carter’s political skills–particularly in his dealings with Congress and with fellow-Democrats–were not quite up to the standards set so far by Barack Obama. Jimmy Carter’s image of fecklessness at home and abroad grew sharper with each year of his presidency, and was a large factor in Reagan’s 1980 victory (there’s a reason, after all, that Republicans still talk about Carter’s brief presidency as an object-lesson, much as Democrats will be talking about George W. Bush’s longer tenure for years to come). It will come as a rather gigantic surprise if Barack Obama faces a major challenge to his renomination, as Ted Kennedy posed to Jimmy Carter in 1980, or has to deal with a third-party candidate stripping away a significant number of liberal votes, as John Anderson did to Carter in the general election.
Moreover, Emery’s account of Reagan’s ideological positioning and messaging doesn’t seem immediately relevant to the needs of Republicans today. As Steve Benen observes today:

Emerie’s article doesn’t exactly offer modern Republican leaders a road map. According to the piece, Reagan, for example, spent much of 1977 emphasizing a hawkish approach to the Soviet Union. In 2009, there is no Cold War. In 1977, Reagan also encouraged the party to work in concert with the fledgling religious right movement. However, the religious right is no longer fledgling, it’s already part of the GOP coalition, and isn’t much of a movement anymore.

I’d add that even Reagan’s anti-government rhetoric and domestic agenda is hardly a panacea today. In 1977 the federal government had been steadily acquiring barnacles for 35 years. The top federal income tax rate was 70%. The number of violent crimes had more than doubled in the previous ten years, as had the number of Americans on public assistance. Just as importantly, the conservative domestic strategies that Reagan championed seemed fresh and new; neither of the previous three Republican presidents, Ford, Nixon and Eisenhower, had done much to change the New Deal or Great Society programs.
The spending buildup by the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress underway may ultimately produce a comeback for anti-government rhetoric, but probably not so long as the economy is in a deep recession, and if the economy improves, it’s unlikely there will be much demand for a quick return to Republican governance.
If, of course, the entire Obama agenda dismally fails, or if there is some foreign-policy-oriented catastrophe, then obviously Republicans will have an opportunity to mount a big comeback. But that’s not a strategy for Republicans; it’s just a thinly disguised desire for bad times to get worse.
Emery’s more compelling set of lessons for today’s Republicans flow from her account of Reagan’s leadership style, which she breaks down into four components: (1) a focus on large central themes rather than individual issues or events; (2) a gracious and civil tone devoid of attacks on the opposition; (3) a relentless tone of optimism and a focus on the future; and (4) an ability to build up the conservative movement while building out a big-tent Republican Party into diverse constituencies.
But the question must be asked: are these qualities very evident in today’s breed of Republican leaders? I don’t think so. Today’s Republicans largely think of Reagan as a political winner with a charming personality who was a rigid ideologue. They don’t like to talk about his serial backdowns in budget confrontations; the two tax increases he signed during his first term; his appointment of “turncoat” Supreme Court nominees O’Conner and Kennedy; or his pattern of giving social conservatives rhetorical comfort rather than actual victories. And for all their admiration of his sunny personality, civility and optimism, they don’t seem capable of emulating these characteristics. Look at how the putative Republican presidential field for 2012 is behaving towards the Obama administration, towards Republican “moderates,” and most recently, towards Sonia Sotomayor, and see how much sunniness and civility and tolerance is being exhibited.
And that brings me to one final observation about Emery’s advice to Republicans: you can’t emulate “Reagan in opposition” without someone who is vaguely like Ronald Reagan. In 1977, Reagan had been the unquestioned leader of the conservative movement for a decade, and a major celebrity since at least the early 1940s. The conservative movement today is probably as factionalized as the GOP as a whole was in 1977, and the closest things they have to universally recognized celebrities are the serially-damaged Newt Gingrich and the highly-controversial Sarah Palin. In 2008 Mike Huckabee made a brief bid for the sunny-side Reagan heritage of the GOP, but is now sounding like a bitter and angry insurgent. The party’s most visible leaders at the moment are Rush Limbaugh, who spends much of his time acting as an ideological commissar lashing Republicans into craven submission, and Dick Cheney–chief of staff to Gerald Ford when he defeated Reagan in 1976–who could hardly be described as sunny or optimistic.
While Noemie Emery has injected some real history into the hagiography of Ronald Reagan, it’s by no means clear that his current worshipers are willing or able to follow his path.

It’s been no secret that one of the great perils of a Total War attack on confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor for Republicans has been the backlash it might provoke among Hispanics, that great potential swing-vote prize of American politics that once so obsessed people like Karl Rove. Indeed, it’s a classic swing-base dilemma for the GOP, which is under intense pressure from its loyal but grumpy culture-war wing to go to the mats, or at least make a lot of conspicuous (and thus politically dangerous) noise, in opposition to Sotomayor.
Writhing in agony on the horns of this dilemma, conservatives are showing some signs of wriggling free under the delusion that a nasty confirmation fight won’t actually hurt them much among Hispanics.
Here and there you see suggestions that Hispanics generally won’t identify with Sotomayor, since she is, after all, a Puerto Rican. Check out this post by David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy:

“Hispanic” includes everyone with Spanish or Portuguese speaking ancestors, and I wonder how much pride, say, Mexican-Americans in California or Central Americans in the Northern Virginia suburbs take in the success of a Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx. One can imagine satisfaction that a fellow “Hispanic” is being nominated to the Supreme Court, but one can also imagine resentment that the first “Hispanic” nominee to the Court is from a relatively small demographic group, Puerto Ricans who live in the mainland, and not from by far the largest group of Hispanics, Mexican Americans.

The comment thread to that post, with scattered anecdotes about intra-Hispanic resentments, is interesting if not very compelling.
Aside from the fact that all the objective signs are that yes, Hispanics of every background are praising Sotomayor’s nomination as historic, there’s the problem that Puerto Ricans themselves are a pretty big deal politically. As a TDS staff post yesterday noted, Puerto Ricans have become a huge and growing factor in Florida elections, already beginning to rival the Cuban-Americans of the state in voting strength if not yet in national notoriety.
And it’s not just in Florida. Puerto Ricans are a significant bloc of voters in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Illinois, Texas and even California. While they are reputed to be an overwhelmingly Democratic group, “stateside” Puerto Ricans are actually not much more tilted towards Democrats than Hispanics generally. On that score, and in terms of their historically low levels of voting participation, there’s probably nothing like direct insults to Sonia Sotomayor so sure to produce a nice backlash against the GOP in the immediate future.
Perhaps the very dumbest move Republicans could make is to wilfully conflate the Sotomayor confirmation fight with appeals to the conservative base over resentments of Hispanics generally, or of immigrants in particular. In addition to giving Mexican-Americans an even stronger reason to identify with the judge, such talk will particularly offend Puerto Ricans, who are American citizens by birth whether born “stateside” or in Puerto Rico itself.
Given that lose-lose proposition, you’d think Republicans would make every effort imaginable to keep Tom Tancredo a million miles away from the debate over Sotomayor’s confirmation. Yet there he was on the tube just the other night, calling her a “racist.” How long will it be before other anti-immigrant voices in “the conservative base” turn this whole thing into a veritable Cinco de Mayo of Hispanic-bashing?
But the most hilarious example of Republican self-delusion came from none other than senior GOP Senator Chuck Grassley of IA, who advanced an interesting version of the so’s-your-old-man argument:

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and member of the Judiciary Committee, noted that Democrats had used a filibuster to block the confirmation of Miguel Estrada, a Washington lawyer nominated by Mr. Bush to be the first Hispanic on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Senate Democrats who considered Mr. Estrada too conservative blocked his nomination after he refused to answer questions about his judicial philosophy at his confirmation hearing.
Mr. Grassley said that since Democrats had not paid a price among Hispanic groups for opposing Mr. Estrada, Republicans should not be held to a different standard if they opposed Judge Sotomayor.

So Hispanics need to give Republicans a free shot at Sotomayor because of Democratic opposition to Estrada, eh? Estrada, in contrast to the mildly center-left Sotomayor, was a big-time conservative legal activist. But even if you brush that aside, Republicans need to put down the crack pipe if they think fighting a circuit court nomination is the emotional or political equivalent to Hispanics of fighting the first Supreme Court nomination. Whatever his merits, people will not be naming their children after Miguel Estrada for years to come. Once Sotomayor is confirmed, there will likely be an upsurge in daughters named “Sonia,” and not just among Hispanics.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

With all due allowances for Jonathan Chait’s impressive logical and rhetorical skills, it’s still amazing how briskly he is able to dispatch the rational arguments made against marriage equality in The New Republic today, reflecting “a body of opinion held largely by people who either don’t know why they oppose gay marriage or don’t feel comfortable explicating their case.” So gay marriage advocates do tend to state rather than explain their position, or come up with assertions about the baleful effects of same-sex marriage that wouldn’t stand up in a high school debate.
Jon begins, however, from a premise that is broadly accurate about the rules of discourse in contemporary Western society, but that clearly isn’t embraced in its entirety among conservatives:

In a liberal society, consenting adults are presumed to be able to do as they like, and it is incumbent upon opponents of any such freedom to demonstrate some wider harm.

That’s another way of saying that the proper question about gay marriage isn’t “why?” but “why not?” And that is indeed the question Americans are beginning to ask more often, particularly as their circle of gay or lesbian acquaintances grow, and as same-sex couples come out of the shadows with no visible bad effect on anything other than the tender sensibilities of homophobes.
But the growing shabbiness of the “rational” case against same-sex marriage helps expose the extent to which gay marriage opponents actually depend on non-rational but still powerful arguments from Tradition and Revelation.
The case from Tradition, which you hear over and over from gay marriage opponents, is that marriage has always been defined as the “union of a man and a woman.” Sometimes in their exasperation they stamp their feet and enumerate how very long always is. The idea is that same-sex marriage is a dangerous act of (to use the term employed by the Catholic Bishops of Iowa in the statement linked to above) “social engineering” that challenges the settled wisdom of the ages. From this quintessentially conservative point of view, of course, the liberal presumption in favor of the rights of “consenting adults” has always been rejected, on this and every subject, in favor of what Chesterton called, approvingly, the “democracy of the dead.” Traditionalists typically try to deploy the rational arguments that Chait demolishes to buttress their case, but their case is essentially unrebuttable because it treats precedent as the only authority.
The main weakness of the Argument from Tradition, of course, is that much of what we have come to recognize as the Western Tradition in recent decades has reflected an Enlightenment-based revolt against much older traditions–in other words, that the liberal habit of mind that Chait cites has become, even though unevenly applied, the real Tradition that demands respect. Even the most rabidly inflammatory exaggerator of the impact of same-sex marriage would have to acknowledge that the emancipation of women has been a vastly greater change in the “traditional” way of life of the human species, and even anti-feminists are loath to suggest we were better off when women couldn’t vote or own property. In the long, long sweep of history, slavery has about as strong a pedigree as “traditional” marriage. So the “democracy of the dead” can and must be overturned now and then in the interests of the living.
Opposition to same-sex marriage based on religious “revelation” (either infallible scripture or infallible Church teaching) isn’t rational, either, and will probably be a tougher nut to crack. Prior forms of discrimination, of course, have appealed to the same “divine” sanction. Perhaps tomorrow’s conservative evangelical Christians will view the attention paid to the Bible’s scattered condemnations of homosexuality much as today’s scoff at their forebearers’ use of Scripture to sanction racial discrimination (e.g., via the Curse of Ham). And perhaps the hierarchies of the Roman Catholic and Latter Day Saints Churches will revise their teachings on same-sex marriage some day, much as the former revised the doctrine of the Jews’ collective responsibility for the Crucifixion and the latter revised the “precious doctrine” of plural marriage.
In any event, Revelation-based opposition to same-sex marriage is a relatively low priority for culturally conservative Christians, who are usually far more exercised about legalized abortion–another affront to both “Tradition” and “Revelation” that in their view represents state-sanctioned mass murder. Beyond that, among hard-core social conservatives, homosexuality is regarded as merely one among many abominations that reflect a general abandonment of the divinely ordained order of life.
In general, the weakness of rational arguments against same-sex marriage, and the inadequacy, in a semi-secular, semi-liberal, future-oriented modern society, of arguments from Tradition and Revelation, are best illustrated by the rise of defensive, circle-the-wagons “arguments” wherein opponents complain about persecution. This phenomenon was especially evident in the furor over Carrie Prejean, whose “innocent” answer to a beauty-contest question about same-sex marriage is being treated by conservatives as an act of Christian martyrdom. As Daniel Gilgoff recently noted, this reflects a general shift among same-sex marriage opponents to claims that giving all Americans the freedom to marry threatens their own freedom of religion.
It should be obvious that this sort of embattled-minority whining no longer reflects the psychology of a confident citizenry, backed by the testimony of the centuries and divine revelation, scornfully dismissing the radical agenda of sodomites and civil libertarians. Once you adopt the Prophetic Stance against the manifest wickedness of your own society–or, to put it in the secular language of the very first issue of National Review, you “stand athwart history yelling Stop!”–then your less-conservative fellow-citizens quite naturally tend to take umbrage at your opinion of them, and begin to identify themselves with the liberal presumption of equality. That could well be what’s happening with the dynamics of the debate over same-sex marriage, as Americans cast a skeptical eye towards the increasing hysteria of opponents, and ask: “Why not?”

Unlike my colleague Matt Compton, I haven’t, so far, been convinced that Twitter is a game-changing, awe-inspiring medium, and in terms of using it as a principal means of communication, I tend to rebel against the character limitations.
But hey, one thing you can definitely say for Twitter is that it can produce some inadvertent admissions by its users, since it really doesn’t give you much opportunity for euphemism or innuendo.
We’ve had a good example of that today, when Newt Gingrich tweeted from Europe:

White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.

I’m guessing that Newt, whose many sins do not include gross stupidity, would have probably preferred to make this a slightly less inflammatory statement, with references to “reverse discrimination” and “ethnocentrism” and “identity politics” and “multiculturalism” and so forth, much as other conservatives have done over the last day. And Lord knows Gingrich can talk just about any subject to death, at mind-numbing length.
But there he was overseas, dependent on his Twitter account to make his views on the news of the day known, and so he hastily typed the R-word, placing himself out there in the fever swamps with the similarly uninhibited Rush Limbaugh. And as Newt should know by now, it’s a fool’s errand for any Republican politician to get into a game of rhetoric one-upsmanship with Limbaugh, who will never have to face a single voter.
I think he should have kept his thumbs off that tiny keyboard on his phone, and taken the awful risk of letting Americans live in suspense for a day or two about his pithy thoughts.

Shortly after reading a meditation by Damon Linker on conservative intellectuals that suggested, among other things, that National Review has recently been sinking into populist demagoguery, I happened upon (via David Kurtz) this gem from Mark Krikorian at National Review Online‘s The Corner:

Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to….
This may seem like carping, but it’s not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that’s not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there’s a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

Lord-a-mercy. Is there anything connected with the Age of Obama that does not denote the collapse of Western Civilization for people like Krikorian?
If Krikorian is offended by the prounciation of the judge’s surname as her parents gave it to her (not in some foreign land, but in the Bronx), he’d probably be genuinely outraged by the pronunciation of the name of her father, Juan, which Latino (the word itself being offensive, says Krikorian, because English dropped gender in nouns a thousand years ago) multiculturalists insist upon. What’s wrong with “John?”
I do hope Krikorian will show some consistency by insisting that we all begin pronouncing the name of Justice Antonin Scalia in the most natural way for English-speakers, which would be “SCALE-ya” (and what’s wrong with “Anthony?”)
I’m reminded of a friend of mine back in the 1980s who insisted on pronouncing the last name of the 40th president of the United States as “REE-gun,” as a sort of permanent insult. At least he thought he was being funny. I doubt that’s Krikorian’s motive, given his general commitment to the cause of resisting immigration. More likely, despite his highfalutin language, he’s interested in stimulating some Heartland resentment towards these godless foreigners who come in and expect us to kowtow to their strange and unnatural ways. So what if Sonia Sotomayor, a native-born American, rose from poverty and childhood illness to excel at those great Anglo-American institutions of Princeton and Yale, before ascending steadily through that most traditionalist institution, the judiciary? So long as she doesn’t encourage us to mangle the pronunciation of her own name, she’s just another multiculturalist determined to drown America in an immigrant tide.
Populist demagoguery, indeed.

Ramesh Ponnuru is one of the smartest conservatives around, so it’s of more than passing interest to see (via Jason Zingerle) that his initial three-word take at The Corner on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor was: “Obama’s Harriet Miers.”
Now maybe all Ponnuru means by that is that Sotomayor’s gender and ethnicity were factors in her nomination; some observers thought Bush picked Miers primarily because she was a woman (rather than because she was a slavishly loyal personal retainer to Bush, much like the un-confirmable Alberto Gonzales).
Beyond that, any comparison becomes rather ludicrous. Miers literally came out of nowhere when she was nominated by Bush; there were plenty of other conservative women available with judicial or academic backgrounds, and Miers was not even mentioned on most short lists. She was a tort lawyer who had worked for Bush for quite some time; her big credential was being elected president of the State Bar of Texas while in private practice. Sotomayer has been a federal judge since 1991, after work both in private practice and as a prosecutor in one of the most visible jurisdictions in the country. She’s been at the top of everybody’s short-list from the moment Justice Souter announced his retirement.
But that’s not what makes the comparison–implying the vain hope that Sotomayor, like Miers, will eventually have to withdraw–so silly. The conservative legal activists who forced Bush to drop Miers may have mentioned her lack of credentials on occasion, but their real beef with her was the lack of any judicial or academic paper-trail that could have firmly established her views on key constitutional issues, and most notably Roe v. Wade. Having been burned badly by Bush’s father with the choice of David Souter, and arguably by their idol Ronald Reagan with Sandra Day O’Conner and Anthony Kennedy, conservatives were in no mood to trust Bush’s word for it that Miers would serve as a reliable vote on the Court. (For a good account of conservative legal strategy in recent years, see Jeffrey Toobin’s fine book, The Nine).
None of these considerations are in the least bit relevant to the Sotomayor nomination, aside from the fact that her credentials are vastly more impressive than were those of Miers (and the fact that no one, actually, is saying she’s not smart or able enough to serve on the Supreme Court; her anonymous detractors in a single magazine article were simply saying she’s no William Brennan capable of waging high-toned constitutional battles with the conservative bloc on the Court. This point was made today by the author of said article, who urged her confirmation).
This is all so obvious that maybe we’ll soon stop hearing about Miers Redux. But in truth, the case against Sotomayor is pretty threadbare, aside from basic disagreement on judicial philosophy. Lots of conservatives are leaping on a comment she made in a speech referring to the Court of Appeals as “where policy is made.” It’s pretty clear from the context of the quote that she was talking about the relative importance of the Courts of Appeal, as opposed to District Courts or even SCOTUS, as the source of federal legal precedent, not about judicial versus legislative authority (as her jocular disclaimer of any advocacy for the belief that judges “make law” should show).
I guess conservatives are playing the hand they’ve been dealt, but as I (and many others) have already noted, they may be playing with fire in casting around so widely for reasons to oppose the first Latina Supreme Court nominee.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

A case against Sotomayor based on her “credentials” or “intelligence” is false on its face–this is a kind of Southern Strategy all over again. By stoking white resentment over the rise of allegedly unqualified minorities getting prominent positions, the GOP is hoping to derail her nomination. It probably won’t work, but it’s another sign of how little the GOP learned from last year’s election.

In other words, Republicans still seem to think the Joe the Plumber constituency is the key swing vote in American politics–even though Joe himself has noisily left the GOP.

In a widely predicted development, the California Supreme Court upheld, by a 6-1 vote, the constitutionality of last November’s Proposition 8 banning same-sex marriages in the state. But it also upheld the validity of approximately 18,000 same-sex marriages performed prior to passage of Prop. 8. That’s significant, not only in terms of the lives of those 18,000 couples, but also because their existence will steadily undermine all the scare tactics employed by opponents of same-sex marriage alleging a corrosive impact on heterosexual marriages or “religious freedom.”
Prop 8 could be rescinded as early as 2010 by another initiative or by an act of the legislature followed by a successful referendum. There’s no question that marriage equality activists in California will take immediate steps to make that happen, in hopes that the lessons of the Prop 8 campaign (see Jasmine Beach-Ferrara’s early analysis of those lessons, which we published in November) will be thoroughly learned and a different result will be achieved next time around.
National GLBT rights advocates will, of course, make their own calculations of where to allocate resources going forward. Today Richard Kim at The Nation argues that the domestic-partnership rights in California that were not affected by Prop 8 are strong enough that perhaps other states with no such rights should become the primary targets for activists in the immediate future. We’ll hear more about this debate in the near future.

One of the ironies of the current conservative mania for “state sovereignty” is that it seems to have magically reappeared as part of the conservative mindset at the precise moment Barack Obama took office. George W. Bush was famously inclined to favor federal policies that preempted state laws that affected business interests, along with so-called unfunded mandates that pursued conservative policy goals, particularly in the law enforcement area.
So I guess it was no surprise that silence is pretty much all we heard from the deeply principled ranks of conservative Tenth Amendment fans when the President issued a landmark directive last week aiming towards reversal of Bush’s preemption habit:

Obama, in a memorandum to federal agency heads issued late Wednesday, said his administration should undertake regulations preempting state laws in rare instances and “only with full consideration of the legitimate prerogatives of the states and with a sufficient legal basis for preemption.”
The president ordered department heads to review all regulations issued in the past 10 years that are designed to preempt state law and determine whether they are justified under the new policy. If they cannot be justified, Obama said, his administration should consider amending the regulations.
Bush administration officials inserted preemptive language into dozens of federal regulations, in many cases shielding corporations from restrictive state laws. For instance, federal preemption provisions stopped California from enforcing a law limiting greenhouse gas emissions.
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“It’s environmental law, it’s drug law, it’s mortgage law, it’s a whole host of areas where the Bush administration was really aggressive about using regulatory action to clear state and local laws that businesses and corporations didn’t like,” said Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center.

You will notice that many conservative states-rights people only get upset at expanded federal power if it disturbs state control of, say, gun policy, or tempts states to participate in federal-state programs aimed at addressing inequality.
So don’t hold your breath for anyone like Bush’s protege Rick Perry–a big-time State Sovereignty advocate these days–to cheer the President for actually respecting state policy prerogatives. States are cool only when they do as conservatives want.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

It is hard to overstate how important the new Obama regulatory standard respecting state regulations and arguing against blanket preemption of state laws will be for progressives. It means that local activism and innovation will actually be effective in holding corporations accountable locally and allow such local legislation to become models for broader federal reforms. That version of collaborative federalism could be one of the most important legacies of the Obama administration.