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.

Now that the President has named Second Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Sonia Sotomayor as his first Supreme Court nominee, Republicans will have to make up their minds exactly how far they want to go in opposing her confirmation, which is virtually certain absent some startling revelations during hearings.
It’s not as though there’s any uncertainty about their line of attack on Sotomayor; it’s been scripted for weeks, as noted by Ben Allen and Jonathan Martin in Politico today:

Previewing the right’s planned reaction, Wendy E. Long, counsel to the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network, said in a statement: “Judge Sotomayor is a liberal judicial activist of the first order who thinks her own personal political agenda is more important that the law as written. She thinks that judges should dictate policy, and that one’s sex, race, and ethnicity ought to affect the decisions one renders from the bench.”

It’s this last clause in Long’s statement that presents the really tempting, and potentially self-destructive conservative line of attack on Sotomayor. To see why it will be tempting, check out this long fretful article by National Journal‘s Stuart Taylor published this weekend, complaining about scattered comments by Sotomayor suggesting that she views her gender and ethnic identity as legitimately and positively affectign her thinking as a judge. And remember that her most famous case involved a claim of reverse discrimination against a municipality by white male firefighters.
Conservatives could definitely try to turn Sotomayor into a latter-day Lani Guinier, and turn her confirmation hearings into a white male pity party, all about identity politics. This would not, of course, go over very well with Latinos, who will naturally feel strongly about their first-ever Supreme Court nominee, and who probably think white men have been pretty well represented in the Court’s history.
Some conservatives may seize on the already-infamous New Republic article by Jeff Rosen suggesting that unnamed former clerks and associates think she’s insufficiently brilliant and/or temperamentally unsuited to be on the Court. This is an even more perilous line of attack, since the whole premise of Rosen’s piece was the progressive hunt for a strongly ideological judicial titan who could go toe-to-toe with the Court’s conservatives. Most regular folks will also have a hard time accepting that someone who graduated summa cum laude from Princeton and was then on the law review at Yale isn’t smart enough for the Court. And she is classically prepared for the appointment, having taken a textbook path to the Court, from prosecutor to district court to Court of Appeals. She doesn’t have the Harriet Miers problem of a skimpy resume.
Given the built-in investment that conservatives have in Supreme Court fights these days, Sotomayor will not get anything like a free ride. But there’s a chance that in the Senate itself (though not out there in the advocacy groups, where apocalyptic talk will predominate) Republicans will keep some powder dry, as noted by Jeff Goldstein at SCOTUSblog:

The most likely dynamic by far is the one that played out for Democrats with respect to Chief Justice Roberts. Democratic senators, recognizing the inevitable confirmation of a qualified and popular nominee, decided to hold their fire and instead direct their attacks to President Bush’s second nominee. Justice Alito was the collateral damage to that strategy. Here, with Justice Stevens’s retirement inevitable in the next few years, Republican senators are very likely to hold off conservative interest groups with promises to sharply examine President Obama’s second (potentially white male) nominee.

We’ll see soon enough, once Sotomayor gets through her first few days in the harsh glare of national publicity.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist
UPDATE II: Jeff Rosen himself has now put up a post at TNR endorsing Sotomayor’s confirmation, and rejecting use of his earlier remarks about her to deny her a position on the Court:

Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court–not that she didn’t have the potential to be a fine justice.

This doesn’t completely eliminate the damage wrought by his earlier article, but will at least force conservatives to put in an asterisk when they quote it.

So even as we all wrangle about the Pew and Gallup surveys suggesting a shift in public opinion on abortion in one direction, CNN releases a new poll that suggests a shift in the opposite direction.
It shows Americans opposing by a 68-30 margin a hypothetical action by the U.S. Supreme Court to “completely overturn” Roe v. Wade. Nate Silver says this is the highest level of support for Roe he can find in the last decade or so.
Nate notes that there are some legitimate criticisms to be made of the wording of this CNN poll. But you know what? There are legitimate criticisms to be made of the wording of virtually every poll on abortion, particularly those that toss out identifers like “pro-life” and “pro-choice” that mean different things to different people. At least the CNN poll involves a specific hypothetical situation, and precisely the one that is relevant as the President prepares to choose a new Supreme Court nominee.

For Republicans obsessed with holding on to their tenuous position in the U.S. Senate, it was big and happy news when Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced he was running for the seat of retiring Sen. Mel Martinez. Yes, former FL House Speaker Marco Rubio, a conservative protege of Jeb Bush, had already announced for the seat. But given Crist’s high approval ratings and huge early polling lead over Rubio, that was easy to ignore. So it wasn’t surprising when TX Sen. John Cornyn, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, endorsed Crist, hoping to clear the field for the governor.
Turns out Cornyn may have forgotten to respect the tender sensibilities of conservative activists, who are still angry at Crist for spitting on the political grave of Katherine Harris by championing felon re-enfranchisement, and who really went wild when Crist endorsed the Obama stimulus package.
As Jonathan Allen and Bart Jansen of CQ explain today, two of the more prominent conservative bloggers, Eric Erickson of RedState and John Hawkins of RightWingNews, have helped organize a campaign and website called “Not One Red Cent” to boycott contributions to the NRSC and push Cornyn to resign as its chairman.
The CQ piece has an interesting quote from Hawkins:

The leadership of the Republican Party keeps saying we need to get back to our principles and talking about how important it is to attract more young voters and Hispanic Americans. Then, we get a viable, young, conservative, Hispanic candidate running for Senate and they arrogantly try to shove him aside to make way for a better connected, moderate pol who’s more acceptable to the GOP establishment.
This cuts to the core of what’s wrong with today’s Republican Party.

The dude does make a valid point about Republican hypocrisy. Since the last election, and arguably since the one before that, Republican pols have chirped like cicadas in unison with the delusional activist belief that the GOP’s problem was insufficient conservatism, and that “diversity” could be accomplished by aggressively recruiting some black or brown candidates who happened to be frothing conservatives themselves. Rubio definitely appears to answer that casting call. So it’s probably fair for activists to get mad when GOP poohbahs pass over Rubio for the first pretty tanned face who comes along, with his fancy poll standings and his reputation as the Last Moderate Standing among Republican headliners.
The “Not One Red Cent” webpage is quite a piece of work. It features a sort of manifesto with the shouting headline: NOT ONE RED CENT FOR RINO SELLOUTS! (the exclamation point is a bit redundant, but I guess that’s a stylistic decision).
Yesterday the site included a post by Richard McEnroe, entitled “A Florida Parable!” and with a subtitle that I cannot reprint in a family-friendly blog, that played off a bizarre news story about two Russian tourists who got caught in Florida having sex with a porcupine. McEnroe “revealed” the identity of the tourists by displaying photos of Michael Steele and Charlie Crist.
Nice, eh? Now as it happens, Mr. McEnroe describes himself on his own blog site, Three Beers Later, as a “South Park Conservative” who believes in “Loose Women and Tight Borders,” so perhaps his particularly sophomoric contributions to the revolt against the RINO SELLOUTS shouldn’t be held against angry conservative activists generally. But if I were Charlie Crist, I wouldn’t laugh these guys off too quickly. They have some deep-pocketed allies in the Club for Growth, which just yesterday demanded that Crist pledge that he would “not follow fellow liberal Arlen Specter’s switch to the Democratic Party if he felt his political survival depended on it.” Since the Club is often credited with pushing Specter out of the Republican Party, that’s a rather pointed analogy they are drawing to Crist.
Whether or not the NRSC starts noticing a pinch in their banking accounts, it’s doubtful that Marco Rubio is going away any time soon. He’s definitely got friends in low places.

I don’t have a lot to say about the unusual “debate”–via back to back speeches at different locations–between the President of the United States and the former Vice President of the United States in Washington today. You can read them here and here, and judge for yourself, or check out the many assessments on the internet (e.g., this early one from Jacob Heilbrunn calling it a rout for Obama).
More interesting to me is the way Team Obama created this “event” in the first place, showing how smart tactics can promote smart strategy.
Remember where we were just yesterday on the “anti-terrorism” issues that were the centerpiece of the Obama-Cheney “debate.” The President was getting hit from every direction on his handling of detainee polices, investigations of interrogation practices, and increasingly, his Iraq and Afghanistan strategies. It seemed nearly everyone was calling him a wimp, a hypocrite, or both, from their varying perspectives. The U.S. Senate had dealt him an embarrassing bipartisan blow on funding for shutting down Gitmo.
It’s hard to imagine a better “reframer” of these issues than a “debate” with Dick Cheney, a deeply unpopular man who is determined to defend the very worst practices of the Bush administration, in a manner that reminds Americans–progressives and moderate independents alike–exactly why they voted for Barack Obama, even if they are disappointed with him on this or that issue. And aside from the specific issues in discussion, there is simply no downside for the White House or for Democrats in keeping Cheney front-and-center as the snarling voice and brooding face of the GOP.
If, in addition to everything else, the initial perception that Obama cleaned Cheney’s clock is broadly shared, you’d have to consider this a tactical and strategic ten-strike for the White House, at a time, and on a topic, where he needed one. The next “frame” (sorry for the bowling metaphor, but I couldn’t resist!) could produce different results, but it was a good day’s work for the President of the United States.

It didn’t get much more than a day’s attention in the MSM, but the announcement over the weekend that the President was appointing Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman as U.S. ambassador to China has created all sorts of insider buzz about the 2012 and 2016 presidential contests and the future of the Republican Party.
Huntsman was by all accounts carefully preparing a 2012 presidential bid, and was rapidly emerging as the one Republican that Democrats feared. Instead, he’s heading to Beijing as an employee of the Obama administration.
Was this, as many commentators asserted, a shrewd maneuver by the White House to “sideline” a potentially dangerous foe? Or, as others suggested, had Huntsman independently decided to cool his presidential ambitions until 2016, when a chastened GOP might turn to him after wearing out its current lurch to the hard right? Or were both strategic considerations in play?
It’s hard to say. With excellent timing, The New Republic has published a long profile of Huntsman by Zvika Krieger that lays out all the relevant facts, including Huntsman’s rivalry with fellow-Mormon Mitt Romney and the unhappy conservative-activist reaction to the governor’s recent endorsement of civil unions for gays and lesbians. You get the impression that perhaps Huntsman seized on the China gig (for which his background strongly prepared him) as an opportunity to sidestep a decision about duking it out with Romney and Palin and Huckabee and Sanford and Lord knows who else in the pursuit of a nomination that turned out to be worthless, much as his friend John McCain did in 2008.
In any event, the payoffs to both sides in the Obama-Huntsman partnership are pretty clear. The President gets a savvy Mandarin-speaking ambassador who can put a bipartisan cast on his efforts to deal with a vast number of U.S.-China issues, from Iran and Darfur to global financial reform to carbon emissions reductions. Huntsman gets a chance to burnish his foreign policy credentials and stay out of the latest struggle for the soul of the GOP. At the moment, it looks like a win-win proposition, particularly for Barack Obama, who will be perfectly happy if there is no “moderate” voice in the 2012 Republican field.

In a step that will be interpreted as a triumph for what passes as Republican “moderation” these days, the Republican National Committee passed a resolution (at a special session called for this purpose) today that accuses the President and the Democratic Party of “pushing our country towards socialism,” but does not specifically demand that Democrats begin calling themselves the “Democrat Socialist Party,” which was how it was originally worded.
Since all the “whereas” clauses in the resolution seem to have been left intact, it doesn’t appear that Republicans have changed their minds about calling Democrats “socialists.” They’ve just abandoned the sophomoric idea of demanding a party name change, complete with cropping “Democratic” to “Democrat,” an odd if ancient GOP ritual.
But maybe that’s too simplistic. To get a sense of Republican “thinking” on this subject, it’s useful to watch a video put together by the American News Project’s Harry Hanbury after interviewing RNC members at a state chair’s meeting yesterday. Here’s what California National Committeeman Shawn Steel had to say:

One point of view is that calling them a “socialist party” is not quite accurate; they’re more like a “national socialist party” the way the Nazis were. Well, I don’t know if that faction is going to prevail or not.
Another group is thinking that “socialism” kind of obscures the real issue of what Democrats are doing. The chairman of Tennessee said it’s really not a matter of “socialism,” but it’s more like “fascism” where the government controls the corporations but the corporations are still semi-private.

So maybe for some RNC members it was a matter not of avoiding name-calling, but of reacing agreement on exactly the right name to call. “Nazi” and “fascist” do have a bit stronger connotation than mere “socialist.”
And there seems to be some disagreement as well about exactly the right label among the all-powerful conservative activist base, at least according to one of its longtime leaders, direct-mail pioneer Richard Viguerie. He’s been conducting an online survey for the last week via his Conservative HQ site, and here’s how his self-identified-conservative respondents break down in describing “President Obama’s political philosophy”: Socialist: 46%; Marxist 24%; Communist: 11%; Fascist:10%; Liberal: 5%; Progressive: 2%.
No, I think it’s definitely premature to say any kind of “moderates” in the GOP have had any kind of “victory” when it comes to thinking about the party that waxed them in the last two election cycles.