It is a summer exercise that often descends intougly insinuations and cheap shots while evading real questions. But perhapsthis time will be slightly different, as the president nominatesand the Senateconsidersa replacement for retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. For once, thenation may confront fundamental differences with a degree of candor.
Influential pundits on the right are advising theSenate Republican leadership to mount a sustained opposition to virtually anynominee chosen by President Obama. The time has come, they argue, for apartisan showdown on the most basic issues that divide the country.
"I think Republicans should want to have aserious debate on the Constitution," says William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, FOX Newscommentator and Republican strategist. “I'm struck when you listen to the TeaParty activists. They often talk about, ‘We need to be constitutionalists, weneed to be constitutional conservatives.'”
The aim of such a debate would not be to influencethe court, since the Senate's majority seems certain to overcome opposition toan Obama nomineeas it did when Sonia Sotomayor ascended to the highest benchlast year.
The purpose would be to drive votes for Republicansin the upcoming midterm electionbecause Kristol and others in his camp plan tointroduce health care reform and other legislative controversies into thenomination debate as "constitutional issues."
Republican Agenda Undermines Social Gains
What exactly do they mean by"constitutional"? On the increasingly powerful fringes of the Republicanright, a category that includes some Tea Party supporters, the Constitution isinterpreted as prohibiting every social and political advance since before theCivil War. They would outlaw the Federal Reserve System, the progressive incometax, Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection, consumer regulationand every other important federal initiative of the past century.
Targets of the "constitutionalconservatives" would certainly include civil rights legislation thatguarantees equal protection under the law to minorities and women, withright-wing zealots, especially in the South, speaking openly again aboutstate's rightsthe old code for racist oppression and segregation.
A serious debate would highlight this extremism,which Democrats, independents and Republicans alike have rejected for most ofthe past five decades. (Retiring Justice Stevens was a Republican nominee,placed on the court by Gerald Ford and confirmed unanimously.)
A serious debate might also reveal the incoherenceof a right-wing jurisprudence that deprives government of the power to addressbasic national problems even as it empowers the president in wartime withabsolute and monarchical authority.
In a recent memo on the upcoming Supreme Courtbattle, political theorist William Galston, pollster Stan Greenberg anddemographic analyst Ruy Teixeira urge their fellow Democrats not to back awayfrom a constitutional debate. They warn that the judicial agenda of theRepublican right would undermine not only Social Security and Medicare, butalso the separation of church and state and the very rule of law in America.
"Democrats canand mustrespond firmly andcategorically to this extremist philosophy," write the three strategists."They must respond by saying that the Democratic Party proudly upholds thetraditional American view of the Constitutionthe view of the founding fathersof this country: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin,Alexander Hamilton and John Adams."
Upheld by Republicans as well, from Abraham Lincolnand Theodore Roosevelt to Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, those principlesencompass religious freedom for everyone regardless of sect or creed; thecapacity of elected representatives to legislate for the common good; and theprotection of individual liberty within a framework of enforceable laws.
So yes, let the debate ripand let the exposure ofthe radicalism of the right begin.
© 2010 Creators.com.
