The Looming Battle

Harry Reid and his leftwing cohorts are girding themselves up for single combat against all of president Bush’s major judge nominations. They plan non-stop filibusters against them all. In an effort to see if the GOP is up to the fight, Hugh Hewitt has posed the following question: Does the Senate GOP Go McClellan or Grant if Harry Reid "Goes Gingrich?"

Some might have preferred a different analogy. Something like does the senate GOP go Neville Chamberlain or Winston Churchill? Given the general lack of knowledge about US history, I’m not too sure that many people know who McClellan and Grant are, but more importantly, just as with the rise of Hitler and the appeasement proposed by Chamberlain, the fate of the whole world could very well rest on the actions of our senate re the confirmation of these important federal judges. Getting these judges confirmed is perhaps the most important thing president Bush could ever do during his remaining four years.

Arlen Specter and his ilk, in a totally misguided effort to appease the hard-core Democratic senators, will make it much more likely that strict-constructionist judges will never get confirmed. What does that mean to all of us? The leftist collection of judges who currently populate the federal bench are much more likely to be soft on terrorists. They are much more likely to make it difficult for our intelligence agencies and law enforcement departments to do their jobs. They are much more likely to allow Islamic terrorists to range freely among us, plotting their next devastating, economy-crippling, morale sapping attack. Such an attack would make us much less able to fend off the Islamic terrorists and their proclaimed ambition of world dominance. And these leftists judges know it, --and don’t care.

The most troubling aspect of Specter’s actions and the milquetoast Republican senators who agree with him is that all their efforts to curry favor with the Democrats, and with the leftist press will fail. The leftists are hard-core ideologues. They will never, never, ever compromise their anti-American pro-terrorists stance on all these issues. They may invite Specter to their cocktail parties, and they may have him on their news programs, but he will never be truly accepted by them. He is merely a “useful idiot” for them. Why he can’t see this, when everybody else can clearly see it, is hard to understand.

It’s clearly time for Senator Frist to engage. He must present a resolution that all federal judges who have been voted out of committee must be voted on by the whole senate immediately. They must be presented for confirmation as a group if necessary. Let the filibuster go on for a day or so, then pass a new rule that cloture of a filibuster can be achieved with a simple majority. The American people want this done. The senators must get the courage to make it so or face their wrath in the next election. The sooner they realize this, the better.