Getting ready
June 28, 2005
By Deirdre Shesgreen
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
WASHINGTON - It was August 1987, a month after the White House had named Robert Bork as its choice to fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Conservative activist Paul Weyrich started to get nervous.
Liberal groups were hammering Bork, and some Democratic senators who had committed to vote for the controversial nominee were starting to go wobbly. So Weyrich paid a visit to Howard Baker, President Ronald Reagan's White House chief of staff.
"We're getting killed," Weyrich recalled telling Baker. "We need a counteroffensive and I'm perfectly willing to make that happen." The ensuing GOP strategy was a matter of some dispute, but the result was not: Bork was defeated.
This time around - as Washington holds its collective breath in anticipation of a vacancy on the high court - Weyrich and other conservatives aren't waiting for a green light from the White House.
Indeed, interest groups on the right and left are like the British and French before Waterloo, with detailed battle plans at the ready.
Conservative groups are already running ads, pre-emptively attacking what they expect will be Democratic opposition to a Bush nominee. Liberal groups are compiling thick opposition research files on potential nominees. And both sides are raising gobs of money.
All eyes will be on the high court Monday, when the current term is scheduled to end, to see whether Chief Justice William Rehnquist, suffering from thyroid cancer - or any other justice - announces their retirement.
In Washington, the looming showdown between legions of political activists already looks and feels more like a full-scale election than a Senate confirmation. That's no accident; both sides have been gearing up for a confrontation since President George W. Bush's re-election victory in November, if not earlier.
This time, the voters will be the members of the U.S. Senate. And the pressure from outside interest groups on those 100 lawmakers promises to be relentless.
"It's just going to be unbelievable," said former Sen. John C. Danforth, R-Mo., who acted as a chief defender of Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination in 1991.
"The conservatives, especially the religious conservatives, are going to want a nominee who has been pretty much pre-cooked, somebody who they think they can count on, so they're going to be very hard to please," Danforth said. And the liberals, he said, "probably don't want almost anybody who President Bush would nominate."
Reid Cox, general counsel to the conservative Center for Individual Freedom, said: "We now have 100 people in the Senate chamber - and thousands more outside - that are (going to) want to give their input on every last comma that these nominees have inserted into their (previous court) decisions" or other legal writings.
Activists on both sides say they anticipate an all-out fight over a Supreme Court vacancy even if it's created by the conservative Rehnquist, whose conservative replacement would not dramatically alter the court's ideological make-up.
"It's not about the tilt of the court," said Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion-rights advocacy group. "It's about replacing an aging conservative with a very young conservative (who could have) a minimum of 40 more years on the court."
"It's going to be a knock-down, drag-out fight no matter who the nominee is," said Jeff Mazzella, president of the Center for Individual Freedom. "It's something we've been preparing for several months, if not several years now . . . and we are ready to mobilize in anticipation of a Bork-like fight."
In advance of a possible Monday announcement, Progress for America, another right-leaning advocacy group, unveiled a $700,000 TV ad campaign this week titled "Get Ready." The ads - the first salvo in what the group says will be an $18 million campaign - warn that "some Democrats will attack anyone the president nominates."
Progress for America and other conservative groups have prepared detailed defenses of the possible nominees' records, lined up friendly "surrogates" to blanket cable and network news shows, and set up field operations in more than 20 states that are home to potential swing-vote senators. (Missouri and Illinois are not among the targeted states.)
"Our role is to make sure that no spurious charge goes unanswered," said Sean Rushton, executive director of the Committee for Justice, formed to promote "constitutionalist" candidates for the courts.
Liberal groups have hired consultants, started digging into the public records of the half-dozen or so candidates thought to be on the White House's short list, and huddled with key Democrats, including Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., to share information and plot strategy.
"We've been working every day since I came here five years ago in preparation for a Supreme Court vacancy," said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way.
Neas said his group has started doing "message research" with focus groups and polls and has assembled a team of veteran Democratic strategists, including Joe Lockhart, former Clinton White House spokesman, and Carter Eskew, a top strategist for Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign.
Lines in the sand
With the war paint already on, the potential for accommodation is slim to none, many say, even though a recently negotiated truce over the use of filibusters to block Bush's appellate court nominees called for White House-Senate consultation on future court picks.
For one thing, though the president will name the candidate and the senators will cast the votes, they will do so with one eye toward placating the outside interest groups so crucial to their respective party bases. And those groups have already drawn lines in the sand.
Nowhere is that line clearer than on the issue of abortion.
Judie Brown, president of the American Life League, said of all the potential Bush nominees floated so far, she hasn't seen one that she'd go to bat for. "The time for wimps is over," Brown said. "I haven't seen that one individual who is willing to say 'Abortion is murder and I'm going to make that very clear if I'm nominated.'"
"All of them are anti-choice," she said. Like Brown, Keenan said she would demand a clear statement on abortion from any nominee.
"They need to be asked where they stand on Roe v. Wade," Keenan said. "We're not going to stand for any ducking or dodging."
It's a long way from the time when nominees could decline to answer such contentious questions on the grounds that the issue might come before them on the court. Today's highly charged climate can be traced back to Bork's nomination 18 years ago, followed four years later by the bitter fight over Thomas.
In an interview, Bork said that because of the highly partisan atmosphere now surrounding judicial battles, any potential nominee will have to "act more like a candidate for political office" than a prospective jurist. He or she will have to prepare speeches, get in front of the TV cameras, and court the myriad constituency groups.
"The entire process has changed so that it becomes explicitly political," Bork said. "The left and the right both insist upon answers in an effort to control the court."
Said Danforth: "I feel sorry for the poor devil who is nominated."
Reporter Deirdre Shesgreen of the Post-Dispatch's Washington bureau writes about Congress. |
