Regarding Supreme Court nominee John Roberts, I think it’s safe to say that the charm offensive has begun. As Exhibit A, I give you this headline in today’s edition of everyone’s favorite mouthpiece of East Coast liberal elitism, the New York Times: Court Nominee’s Life Is Rooted in Faith and Respect for Law Well, crap—in that case, I’d have to be flat-out crazy (or un-American) to question whether or not he should be appointed to the Court.
My apologies for the dearth of posts the last few days. One of our servers at work went down over the weekend, and I have spent almost the entirety of the last two days holed up in the server room. As a result, sitting in front of the computer is about the last thing I feel like doing when I get home. Currently, I’m caught up in licensing hell for our outdated mail server, and am waiting for a West Coast support center to open so that I can call them.
A few days ago, Craig and I were discussing the various woes facing Senate Democrats as a result of the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. While I may write about the actual content of that conversation, what I actually want to talk about here is of a more tangential nature. Part of what we were discussing is what would constitute the Democrats’ best strategic response to the President’s nominee to replace O’Connor, and how such strategies might be received by liberals and progressives at large.
So O’Connor has resigned. I’m betting Rehnquist will stick around as long as he can. Either way, I think it’s still too early in the game to start making specific predictions. However, I see no reason to expect that the Bush administration would nominate anyone approaching a moderate, centrist candidate. They’ll either go with someone close to the administration who they think will put Senate Democrats in a tough spot, or a hard-line cultural conservative as a pay-off to their Christian Conservative constituency.