I’m not saying that liberals didn’t oppose the nominations of John Roberts and (especially) Samuel Alito. I think a lot of us were pretty intemperate and vituperative in our opposition to both of them. And we said some pretty harsh things about weak-kneed Democrats who had the power to block their nominations and failed to use it. So, I understand how the Republican base feels about a judge who supports abortion rights and following the law on affirmative action. I understand how they are going to feel when Republican senators do little more than give lip service to opposing Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation. But there are some differences.
First of all, it’s hard to relate to people whose agenda is to overturn thirty-six years of legalized access to abortion, or who want to completely wipe out the practice of affirmative action. It’s impossible to relate to people who oppose a judicial candidate because they don’t like latinos or because they don’t think women are good at being judges or politicians (as a woman-caller told CSPAN this morning). Their ideas are radical in the sense, at least, that they want to make fundamental changes to the law rather than to keep the law the way it is. For quite some time the real conservatives on judicial matters have been the liberals that want to protect the gains we have made and not the right-wingers who want to take them away. Even if I can empathize with how right-wingers feel about seeing a liberal judge put on the Supreme Court for a lifetime appointment, I can’t agree that their fears are as meritorious or as mainstream as ours were in the cases of Bush’s nominations.
Second, our loud, obnoxious, and vituperative opposition was taking place on blogs. Our shrillest voices were not being broadcast to hundreds of millions by ClearChannel and FOX, CNN, and MSNBC. Our shrillest voices were not current or former politicians. If we undermined our case for opposing Alito and Roberts by putting a crazed and hyperpartisan bent on that opposition, hardly anyone noticed. By contrast, while the Republicans on Capitol Hill have no more intention of blocking Sotomayor than the Democrats on the Hill had of blocking Roberts and Alito, their crazy base is all over the radio and the teevee saying incredibly ugly things about Sotomayer’s race, gender, morality, judgment, temperament, and qualifications.
The Democratic senators had it easy. They wanted to vote yes and the Republicans gave then the threat of the nuclear option to sell voting yes to their mostly unheard base. The Republican senators want to vote yes and yet every day for the next 75 days they will have to deal with their base whipping themselves into a frenzy of racist, misogynistic, liberal-hating. They won’t get any credit for voting yes because the country’s persuadables will be too scarred and horrified from the whole experience to give a shit how they actually voted.
This points out an odd structural advantage for the Democrats. The Republicans’ informal media megaphone is too loud. It is more convenient to have a base with no voice. That way you don’t have to listen to them and the rest of the world doesn’t get the strange idea that your party believes in what it preaches, with disastrous results.
This post is only partly tongue-in-cheek.
