Leftist Totalitarians

UPDATED below:

With confirmation hearings on John Roberts only days away, the country's never been in greater danger of extremism. No, not Judge Roberts--his outrageous and undemocratic opponents.

• Following revelations by Drudge, the NY Times was forced to admit it dug into adoption records of Judge Roberts' two children, including asking adoption lawyers how the long-sealed records could be opened. The Times tried to minimize the investigation, which apparently was suspended only when it "came up dry."¹ "Slimy Slimeballs," says Professor Bainbridge. This is a paper, and a political movement, committed to vigorous preservation of individual privacy? Not for Republicans, as NRO Editor Kathryn Jean Lopez observed:

  Nevermind decency. Let's talk shop. Dems: You better condemn that line of inquiry, and fast. 2006 is election year, and don't play with the kids. On a Supreme Court nomination? People aren't going to miss that.

• Speaking of privacy, the privacy mavens at the NARAL launched a "disgusting" television ad linking Judge Roberts with abortion clinic violence. Were Roberts and convicted abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph separated at birth?
  
  No. The leftist smear focuses on Roberts’ actions as an attorney, in particular, an "amicus brief in 1991 on the side of the notorious Operation Rescue, convicted clinic bomber Michael Bray, and others in the Supreme Court case Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic, as well as his 1992 efforts in a U.S. District Court to lift an injunction against Operation Rescue." What happened to "everyone deserves a lawyer?" I guess Gideon v. Wainwright doesn't cover anyone still searching for "privacy" and "abortion" in the Bill of Rights. Leftists treat a right not contained in the Constitution, and born in non-absolutist compromise language,² more strictly than the Second Amendment's right to bear arms, despite the latter's "shall not" language.
  
  And typically, NARAL's wrong on the facts. As detailed by the Annenberg school's non-partisan FactCheck.org:

  The ad is false.
  
  And the ad misleads when it says Roberts supported a clinic bomber. It is true that Roberts sided with the bomber and many other defendants in a civil case, but the case didn't deal with bombing at all. Roberts argued that abortion clinics who brought the suit had no right use an 1871 federal anti-discrimination statute against anti-abortion protesters who tried to blockade clinics. Eventually a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court agreed, too.
  
  The images used in the ad are especially misleading. The pictures are of a clinic bombing that happened nearly seven years after Roberts signed the legal brief in question. . .
  
  In words and images, the ad conveys the idea that Roberts took a legal position excusing bombing of abortion clinics, which is false. To the contrary, during the Reagan administration when he was Associate Counsel to the President, Roberts drafted a memo saying abortion-clinic bombers "should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law." In the 1986 memo, Roberts called abortion bombers "criminals" and "misguided individuals," indicating that they would get no special treatment regarding requests for presidential pardons. Reagan in fact gave no pardons to abortion-clinic bombers. . .
  
  The ad contends that Roberts "filed court briefs supporting violent fringe groups and a convicted clinic bomber." Indeed, Roberts' name appears on the "friend of the court" brief in Bray v. Alexandria Women's Health Clinic that the ad shows. But what Roberts was supporting wasn't violence or bombing or even the behavior that was the subject of the lawsuit - blockades of clinics. In fact, Roberts went out of his way to say that the blockaders were trespassing, which is a violation of state law. What Roberts argued was that a federal anti-discrimination law couldn't be used against abortion blockaders because they weren't discriminating against women – they were blockading men, too.

  As MaxedOutMama says, "This is completely inappropriate." Indeed, especially since Roberts was unstinting in condemnation of clinic bombers.
  
  Intelligent people know that the "technical question of where violence should be punished has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the lawyer actually excused the violence -- which Judge Roberts of course did not." Apparently, NARAL's ad is aimed elsewhere--at Moonbat leftists.



• As widely noted here and elsewhere, Moonbats think the Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion excludes Christians, especially Catholics. Less than 50 years after JFK's election made anti-Catholic bigotry unacceptable, and in disregard of the Constitutional prohibition on "religious tests" (Article VI, Section 3) for public office, Christopher Morris's Boston Globe Op-Ed singles out Catholics for special treatment:

  [T]he Senate Judiciary Committee should draft legislation calling for the automatic recusal of Catholic judges from cases citing Roe v. Wade as a precedent. . .
  
  It is obvious that mandatory disqualification of Catholic judges from abortion cases would have only the most minor effect on their professional lives. Everyone agrees that people like Justice Antonin Scalia and Roberts are fully able to fairly adjudicate 99 percent of the cases that come before them. . .
  
  If US taxpayers are going to subsidize activities by tax-exempt Christian organizations, they have the right to be told what constraints their followers are under while they sit in judgment of Americans who may not share their religion. When constraints amount to sanctions, impartial decisions are impossible; judges then owe Americans the duty of disqualifying themselves.

  Leftists will do anything to preserve abortion -- even third trimester partial birth abortion -- from the most modest restrictions. This is insane, as the WSJ's James Taranto observes, "In other words, in order to preserve the bogus constitutional right to abortion, it is necessary to disregard the actual constitutional provisions for church-state separation and against religious tests for officeholders."

Conclusion: When President Clinton nominated a former ACLU General Counsel and board member to the Supremes, she was confirmed 97-3. During Ruth Bader Ginsburg's confirmation hearings, Republicans didn't oppose because she was a liberal--the issue was solely whether she was a good jurist. Similarly, Republicans didn't stall confirmation of, say, liberals like Attorney General Janet Reno or HHS Secretary Donna Shalala; Presidents have the near-absolute right to select their advisors. But Senate Democrats filibustered Otto Reich and John Bolton because they disagreed, not because either was unqualified -- and then whined when President Bush exercised his Constitution prerogative (Article II, Section 3) to name recess appointments.

Welcome to the era of double standards. The leftist treatment of Judge Roberts demonstrates beyond cavil that no conceivable conservative could ever be acceptable in any job, and that no condition -- however mild -- on unrestricted abortion will be tolerated. This isn't democracy, it's one party rule. And it's enabled by Senate Rule XXII -- the filibuster -- which cannot constitutionally be applied to appointment clause (Article II, Section 2) procedures.

Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi says, "It is time for Democrats to stop moaning about John Roberts and John Bolton and start doing something productive -- such as figuring out how to win elections." Agreed. But, until they do, Republicans control the White House and the Senate. It's time to take off the gloves: recess appointments of young Turk conservatives to all unfilled federal judgeships, and dumping the bad McCain "deal" and the less than century-old filibuster.
______________

¹ Jeff Goldstein at Protein Wisdom suggests other potentially fruitful angles for Times investigators, including:

2. Conservatives, who hate freedom, want nothing more than to "get their hands on women’s uteruses"; therefore, it stands to reason that John Roberts—a conservative—might very well have a vat-full of uteri tucked away somewhere. Is the Judge willing to open any safety deposit boxes and/or storage units to clear himself of charges of uterus hording?

3. The Federalist Society: conservative jurists discussing the minutia of legal restraint and federalism? Or code for “how best to jail the darkies?" . . .

7. How does the Pope sleep in that big hat of his? Seriously, how can he fit in a confessional with that thing on? I mean, it’s got to be cumbersome, right? Because it’s so frickin’ huge? . . .

9. On a vacation to Mexico in 1978, did Judge Roberts’ wife, Jane, participate in a 16mm snuff film in which, high on smack and cheap tequila, she beds down a slightly wounded pack mule, then slits the throat of a blindfolded Tijuana hooker?

² See Roe v Wade, 410 U.S. 113 153-54 (1973) :

[A]appellant and some amici argue that the woman's right is absolute and that she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way, and for whatever reason she alone chooses. With this we do not agree. Appellant's arguments that Texas either has no valid interest at all in regulating the abortion decision, or no interest strong enough to support any limitation upon the woman's sole determination, are unpersuasive. The Court's decisions recognizing a right of privacy also acknowledge that some state regulation in areas protected by that right is appropriate. As noted above, a State may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health, in maintaining medical standards, and in protecting potential life. At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision. The privacy right involved, therefore, cannot be said to be absolute. In fact, it is not clear to us that the claim asserted by some amici that one has an unlimited right to do with one's body as one pleases bears a close relationship to the right of privacy previously articulated in the Court's decisions. The Court has refused to recognize an unlimited right of this kind in the past. . .

We, therefore, conclude that the right of personal privacy includes the abortion decision, but that this right is not unqualified and must be considered against important state interests in regulation.

(via Michelle Malkin; Kobayashi Maru; Blogs for Bush; GOP Bloggers)

More:

I predicted (heh) this:

Sadly, it now it seems that Roberts' children can add treason to their long list of scandals. According to eyewitness accounts from MoveOn.org and NARAL spokespersons, the Roberts children leaked the identity of super-duper top secret agent Valerie Plame to Robert Novak, a Republican operative and closet homosexual. Plied with ice cream and a trip to Disneyworld by the diabolical and queer-as-a-three-dollar-bill Karl Rove, Jack and Jane Roberts had no qualms about destroying the life of an American hero and condemning her husband to an endless succession of lucrative book deals.

Still More:

NARAL pulled its anti-Roberts ad, without apology:

We regret that many people have misconstrued our recent advertisement about Mr. Roberts' record," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America.

"Unfortunately, the debate over that advertisement has become a distraction from the serious discussion we hoped to have with the American public," she said in a letter Thursday to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who had urged the group to withdraw the ad.

Instead, the liberal lobby group substituted a "fact sheet" that repeats the ad's allegations and thus is anything but factual.

(via NIF)