Just Do It - Confirm Alito

In a stunning editorial today, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel urged confirmation of Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court of the United States. Why stunning? Because the J/S rarely supports anything proposed by the Bush administration.

You can read the whole editorial here. Here is a quote from the piece.

Democrats are understandably concerned about specific red flags in Alito's record but should nonetheless reject a filibuster. Nor should they move, as it appeared likely late last week they would, to delay the committee's vote. Both would be antithetical to the democratic process in this specific case.

That's because, though we would have preferred Alito to be more open about his judicial philosophy, he did make one case quite effectively. He is a conservative jurist. This is what the electorate, albeit narrowly, indicated it wanted when it re-elected George W. Bush as president in 2004. There can be no reasonable claim that voters did not know this to be a likely consequence of their votes.

I couldn't agree more. In fact, I made the same argument here in my editorial published in the Journal Sentinel on November 5th.

Here is the whole editorial.

Battle lines have been drawn.

Democrats have their talking points memorized. By "caving to the far right" and nominating U.S. Appeals Court Judge Samuel Alito, "a conservative ideologue" for the Supreme Court who will "turn back the clock on human rights," President Bush is "dividing the nation."

Dividing the nation? Let's take a deep breath here.

Someone needs to remind these folks of the basic concept of our form of government. We have three branches - executive, legislative and judicial.

The citizenry gets to choose the first two through the election process. The president (elected by the people) gets to select the judges for the Supreme Court, and the Senate gets to approve them.

So, indirectly, even though people don't get to vote for judges, they elect the people who can select and influence who is appointed to the bench.

Since Supreme Court justices are appointed for life, this works fairly well. When the Democrats win, they appoint liberal judges. When the Republicans win, they appoint conservatives. This helps achieve a balance on the court that represents the interests of the American people.

As a reminder to many who seem to have forgotten, Bush won the last election by a 3 million popular vote margin. (Remember all the gnashing of teeth in 2000, when Democrats claimed that Bush "stole the election" because Al Gore won the popular vote? We haven't heard any reference to "popular vote" from the Democrats since November 2004.)

When the majority put Bush in the White House, one of their expectations was that he would nominate conservative jurists who would bring the Supreme Court back into balance.

That's the way it works. It worked that way for President Clinton when he nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is about as "centrist" as Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean.

Republicans voted overwhelmingly to confirm her, since they seem to understand how our government works. The Senate gets to vet the nominees and make sure they have the qualifications to fulfill their duties - not to overturn the president's right to place judges.

At the conclusion of the hearings, their job is to vote "yea" or "nay" on the confirmation. It is a simple and logical process that has served this country well for many years.

Unfortunately, Democrats cannot come to grips with the fact that they lost the last election. Since they can't legitimately appoint their own judges, they have come up with the loony concept that the president should nominate Supreme Court justices that will "bring the country together."

Even if this were an achievable result, the Democrats are the last people on Planet Earth that have any credibility in this area. Listen to the vindictive rhetoric from Democratic Sens. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Ted Kennedy, Dick Durbin and Chuck Schumer on a daily basis and picture them playing a role in "bringing the country together."

But let's stop laughing for a moment and consider their suggestion. There is one simple problem. There is no way to nominate a justice that will "bring the country together."

The voters who elected Bush expect him to follow through on his campaign promise to appoint conservative judges. We are not interested in having him compromise on this point. We are not interested in having him nominate judges he thinks will be conservative.

We want a nominee with a track record and judicial experience. We want a nominee with the capability of providing thought leadership on the bench. We want a justice with the personal power to persuade his more liberal colleagues to consider an alternative viewpoint.

We are not interested in having Bush play some sort of political appeasement game with our judicial appointments. If the Democrats want the right to appoint judges, they need to earn that right, fair and square.

Until then, they can start "bringing the country together" by dropping their oppositional defiance and starting to do their jobs. One of their jobs is to give serious consideration to Bush's nominee and vote him up or down based on his qualifications.

Anything less is a repudiation of our system of government and a disenfranchisement of the 62 million voters who put Bush in the White House.

I'm glad to see that the Journal Sentinel agrees. Their editorial was well-written, logical and reasonable. It should have the anti-Bush contingent foaming at the mouth.