Supreme Court madness: Yet another right-wing nervous breakdown

 THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter

Ever since conservatives went crazy last century, it’s become a Washington ritual: Some Republican president nominates a reactionary ideologue to the Court and the right screams that failure to confirm could doom Western civilization and all we hold holy; some Democratic president nominates a learned moderate and the right screams that even pondering confirmation could doom Western civilization and all we hold holy.

This phenomenon appears to be an involuntary reflex among the hyperemotional right, much as they greeted Medicare as a godless scheme to Marxinize America’s soul, or fluoridation of drinking water as a dazzling corruption of our psychic synopses, or, these days, the harmless AmeriCorps as a brain-sucking political reeducation plot.

Hence within minutes of Justice David Souter’s retirement announcement the right once again envisioned America at the abyss — everything, from religious freedom to the family unit, now wobbles at the edge of apocalyptic destruction, liberal-style — so they march forth to clang the alarm of bogeymen, or in this instance, bogeywomen, everywhere.

When it comes to a Democratic president’s Supreme Court nomination, it’s easy for the right to compile a public enemies list: it simply entails whoever is mentioned. They all, every one of them, we learn, are lifetime members of the monstrous liberal conspiracy, dastardly cultivated from the earliest age to join the socialist hordes at just the right moment and ring in a new era of atheistic, and undoubtedly forced homosexual, Stalinist and Richard Simmonsian collectivization.

So the sky is now falling. How could it not be? pleads the right. Just take a gander at President Obama’s hair-raising phalanx of unquestionable radicalism eager to rip our Constitution, nay, our very way of wholesome life, to shreds: Federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor of New York; Elena Kagan, U.S. solicitor general; Diane Wood, from the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals; Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm; Stanford University law professor Kathleen Sullivan; Kim McLane Wardlaw of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit; and Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears.

It just leaps out at you: Never has humanity been so imperiled by such a conspicuously unaccomplished throng, which, happily for the insecure right, is all feminine, and no doubt lesbians all, who, when not shredding the Constitution and forcing homosexual teachers to recruit kindergartners, go around quoting Alan Watts and the poetry of Sappho. Oh, gentle reader, these times loom dark indeed.

Because this, in 2007, when we were still basking in the many blessings of G.W. Bush’s paradise, is what candidate Obama ideally foresaw in a Supreme nominee: "We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor, or African-American, or gay, or disabled, or old."

Yes, it wasn’t enough for Obama to plan a return to governmental competence; no, he wanted to haul "empathy" into it, to put some justness in justice, to better humanize a body of law which historically has favored those who could afford to write it.

That was all the right needed to convulse itself into paranoid tangles of hysteria. The National Review Online’s Ed Whelan, noted the Times’ Caucus, immediately "use[d] the Obama quote about ‘the heart, the empathy’ to deride Mr. Obama for lacking a dispassionate judgment separate from a political decision. ‘Obama’s own record and rhetoric make clear that he will seek left-wing judicial activists who will indulge their passions, not justices who will make their rulings with dispassion,’ Mr. Whelan wrote."

You know, like splendidly detached, wholly non-ideological justices such as Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the very models of judicial dispassion.

Wendy Long, a former law clerk to the latter, issued a statement that is still flying around in search of some rational tarmac: "The current Supreme Court is a liberal, judicial activist court…. If Obama holds to his campaign promise to appoint a Justice who rules based on her own ‘deepest values’ and what’s in her own ‘heart’ — instead of what is in the Constitution and laws — he will be the first American President who has made lawlessness an explicit standard for Supreme Court Justices."

Oookay. Watson, the needle.

And for heaven’s sake let’s not neglect Michelle Malkin’s ravings, neatly bundled in a blanket fusillade. Her "legal sources" — yep, reputation-murdering goons, she wrote — "have compiled sketches of Obama’s top three likely picks…. Gird your loins," advised Ms. Malkin, especially for this coming tautology: "Judge Sotomayor’s nomination … would be very concerning given her hard-left record on the Court of Appeals, where she is recognized by practitioners as one of the more liberal judges."

Naturally former dean of Harvard Law School Elena Kagan "has taken positions that are disturbingly out of the mainstream," continued one of Malkin’s "sources," and of course Appellate Judge Diane Wood’s "judicial views have on occasion been far outside mainstream legal thought." Yeah, Ivy League law school deans and appellate judges are notorious for that.

And on the political side of things, but still mixed with the academic stuff of abnormal psychology, comes this from a "Republican source": "The GOP obviously does not have much power in D.C. these days, but just like we helped ourselves by opposing the deficit-busting stimulus, opposing left-wing nominees like [Sotomayor] is our path back to the majority."

I kid you not. That’s the quote, that’s the mindset, that’s the unending, self-destructive, seemingly involuntary reflex of the GOP. They just don’t get it, and apparently never will.

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THE FIFTH COLUMNIST by P.M. Carpenter