Chuck the Schmuck, McCain the Pain

Saturday, November 18th, 2006 12:03 pm by Neal

Check out Hugh Hewitt’s post, “The Gang of 14’s Legacy: John McCain’s Burden”, on how McCain’s Gang of 14 destroyed the opportunity to right a wrong that united all Republicans. With any luck, McCain destroyed his chances at the Presidency as well. Hewitt also notes how, thanks to McCain, leftists like Chuck “the Schmuck” Schumer stand poised to continue their assault on the judiciary.

With friends like John McCain, who needs enemies?

Early in the week Senator Chuck Schumer was telling reporters that “Judges are the most important,” and that “One more justice would have made it a 5-4 conservative, hard-right majority for a long time. That won’t happen.”

Now that’s a “veiled” threat, because it doesn’t forthrightly set out the particulars of the consequences that will follow from the nomination of another SCOTUS candidate like Chief Justice Roberts or Justice Alito. It also categorizes the two new members of SCOTUS as “hard right,” which on the basis of what we have seen to date is just absurd, and an obvious part of Senator Schumer’s continuing and relentless assault on the right of Americans to hold originalist, constitutional majoritarian views on the Constitution and its intended operation. Schumer is a master propagandist, and never lets up inhis effort to define the terms in ways favorable to his radical agenda of delegitimizing the historical mainstream of American legal theory. (He is not, howver, so funny when trying to be.)

There is no need to rush with Senator Schumer. We will have two years to follow Senator Schumer’s very dangerous and very dishonest assault on the judiciary.

These exchanges on judicial nominees are very important because they underscore why the Gang of 14 is so great a burden upon Senator McCain’s presidential ambitions.

Yesterday, incredibly, Senator McCain was out peddling the spin that the Gang of 14 was a good thing, an accomplishment of which he is proud, and for which the GOP should thank him. In two speeches Thursday, McCain, according to the Washington Post, “defended his participation in the bipartisan ‘Gang of 14’ compromise in the Senate, saying that compromise helped ensure the confirmation of many of Bush’s judicial nominees.”

This is, of course, complete nonsense, and the various statements from Schumer, McConnell and Coburn all serve to underscore the obvious: From the time that Patrick Leahy took the gavel of Judiciary after Jim Jeffords big jump to the time that Senatro McCain engineered (not “participated in,” thank you very much, WaPo) the issue of the radical assault on the judicial nomination process by the hard left edge of the Senate Democrats and “the groups” they serve was the central issue of domestic politics.

And because of Senator McCain, the GOP lost the opportunity to win that issue and retsore the Constitution’s design.

Read the entire post here.

Comments are closed.