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August 15, 2005 |
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT
The communications director of the National Abortion Rights Action League has resigned, some think fired, but has resigned in protest over the wimpish behavior of the NARAL people themselves in pulling the ad. And there's a story that ran, let's see... I guess it's Saturday in the New York Times from Cheryl Gay Stolberg: Glow of Ad Shows Democrats' Dilemma. "The decision by an abortion rights advocacy group to withdraw an advertisement attacking Judge John G. Roberts Jr. signals a deepening conflict within the Democratic Party, which has grappled for months over how much to emphasize abortion and is now divided about how hard to fight Judge Roberts's nomination to the Supreme Court. Some Democrats say the furor over the advertisement, which was placed by Naral Pro-Choice America and which described Judge Roberts as 'one whose ideology leads him to excuse violence against other Americans,' suggests that they will have a difficult time generating opposition to the nominee, whose legal résumé and charm have won him praise from senators of both parties. 'You could see from Naral pulling their ads down that the public is not going to tolerate going too far,' said Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, who says Democrats will face difficulty if they frame the Roberts nomination solely in terms of abortion rights. 'By all accounts it looks like he is going to get confirmed. So they are in a very difficult position.'" And there is throughout the news, throughout my stacks of stuff today there are stories that show the frustration and the resignation on the part of the left that they're not going to be able to stop this guy. He's just too nice. He's just too plain. |
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 In fact, to show you how absurd it's gotten, William Raspberry, a man I like, a man I admire, we've had our run-ins with Mr. Raspberry early on in this program's life back in the early nineties, late eighties, I forget when it was, but Mr. Raspberry wrote a piece ripping me and ripping this program, and after that piece he got several letters from readers saying, "Mr. Raspberry, I love your column, and I love Mr. Limbaugh's show. I read you and listen to him." So Raspberry tuned in, and he did an apology essentially, saying that he had misjudged. I forget precisely what he said, but we call it the Raspberry Effect. The Raspberry Effect is when a journalist critical of the program who has never listened, or any liberal critical to the program, actually listens and changes their mind. And ever since we've had a tremendous amount of respect for Mr. Raspberry, but he illustrates today just how frustrated the left is because his piece, his column is that Roberts is not qualified because he's had it too easy in life. His road was paved for him, he was the son of some wealthy industrialist, and he's never known tough times, and we don't need people on the court who haven't known tough times. We need people on the court who have had to struggle, which of course is another way of saying the court is supposed to relate to social concerns and the disadvantaged and give them a voice, which is as far from the intention of the Supreme Court, the Founding Fathers had, as you can get.
The purpose of the Supreme Court is to decide the law, to decide legal cases. They decided for themselves in the late 1800s that they were going to be the sole arbiter of what's constitutional or what isn't. It's called judicial review, Marbury vs. Madison. But the left clearly sees the Supreme Court as the balancing mechanism to level the playing field between society's haves and have-nots, society's fortunates and society's unfortunate, society's successful and society's bums. And since Roberts has never been a bum, since Roberts has never had it tough in life, that's a problem. I mean, this is just throwing it up against the wall. The resignation -- and I'm not saying there won't be fireworks, don't misunderstand, they're going to -- that's all they know how to do. They'll try to stop the confirmation during the hearings, but you can just see the resignation. We gotta go back, though, what is all this about? The NARAL ad. Here it is. |
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This is the ad that's been pulled. NARAL said, well, "We think people are not understanding it or misconstruing it." In other words, you're too stupid to understand what they were trying to say. In an effort to further the understanding between you and the NARAL pro-abortion people, here is their ad once again run free of charge by me, as a public service to you, the EIB Network.
(Playing of NARAL ad.)
(Playing of John Roberts spoof ad.)
Mark my words. They're meeting behind closed doors, and what they think they messed up was the timing. They're not embarrassed about this ad. They pulled it for  expediency. They pulled it because it wasn't working. They didn't pull it because it's a bunch of lies. They didn't pull it for any reason of substance. And they're going to go back to the drawing board, and they'll figure out that the problem was they came out with it too soon. Came out with it in August, the recess, vacation time. Come out with this thing a week or ten days before the hearings, you've got a whole different story. They'll probably have a new one. NARAL is probably putting together a new ad now to come out, you know, 1st of September, latter part of August. Let's go to C-SPAN's Washington Journal today, a caller from Silver Springs, Maryland, talking about the nomination of Judge Roberts.
CALLER: Good morning. I wanted to talk about the ad that the pro-abortion group put out. The reason why it got pulled was, in my opinion, is, Rush Limbaugh, the parody of that ad, and in this parody he accused John Roberts of driving the bomber to the abortion clinic and then using the cell phone setting off the bomb. It sounds like an honest-to-goodness ad. I've had two or three people come up to me and ask me if it was really true that John Roberts drove the bomber to the abortion clinic. I said, "No, you're hearing Rush Limbaugh at his best when he's being funny. And there is truth to comedy."
RUSH: It's comforting to know that there are those who get it.
END TRANSCRIPT |
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Read the Article... |
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A Bad Shift for the Court
By William Raspberry
Monday, August 15, 2005
If you're concerned about the rightward drift of the U.S. Supreme Court, you may be hoping -- as I am -- for a smoking-gun revelation that would disqualify John G. Roberts Jr.
Sometimes we even imagine we've found the damning evidence. For instance, despite his careful attempts to shield his private views -- either by declining to put them in writing or by making it appear that the positions he took were merely those of his clients -- we are learning some things about the nominee that confirm our suspicions. He has been, virtually since his arrival in government, not just a counsel but an advocate of positions that, to civil rights partisans, for instance, seem well out of the settled mainstream.
He wanted, his memos confirm, to limit the reach of the Voting Rights Act, to do away with such race-conscious approaches as school busing and affirmative action, to curtail the application of Title IX to equalize opportunity for women, and to strip the Supreme Court of its ability to hear certain classes of civil rights cases.
And we wonder why none of it seems to matter. Don't the American people understand the danger of letting the Supreme Court become, in essence, a partisan of one side in a closely divided nation?
In a word, no. I've just looked at something I wrote on the subject more than a dozen years ago, and I'm not sure I'd change a word of it now:
"Certainly it is within the prerogatives of presidents to name to the federal judiciary men and women whose views are more or less consistent with their own. But it is also within the bounds of good government to keep the courts -- and the Supreme Court in particular -- generally reflective of the populace. It's just another way of legitimizing the judiciary.
"Presidents used to understand that (although their idea of what was 'reflective' of America was more likely to embrace ideology than race or gender). Not only did the fairly conservative Eisenhower appoint Earl Warren; the conservative Nixon appointed [Harry] Blackmun, who authored the Roe v. Wade opinion, and the liberal Kennedy appointed [Byron] White, who dissented from it. It was once a matter of good sense -- FDR's court-stacking attempt notwithstanding -- to keep the court within some sort of rough political balance.
"Only in fairly recent times has the Supreme Court come to be viewed as part of an ideological spoils system."
You get an idea of the degree to which that description still applies when you consider that the most troubling revelation to Roberts's supporters -- the only one they have felt it necessary to explain away -- is that he once gave pro bono legal advice to a gay rights group.
What is so magical about having the court generally in the mainstream? Two things, I think. The first is balance. I may hold strong views on certain subjects, but I wouldn't want to run a newspaper where everybody subscribed to those views. Certainly I'd like my views generally to prevail, but I'd also want readers who held different views to have some confidence that my publication was interested in truth and fairness. If that's true of a newspaper, where countless alternatives are available, how much truer it is of the Supreme Court.
The second thing about balance came from a friend -- black, conservative and Republican -- who was laying out the reasons he opposes the Roberts nomination.
It isn't his conservatism, my friend said, but the too-smooth path by which Roberts has arrived at this juncture. Son of a wealthy steel executive, Roberts attended private schools, Harvard and Harvard Law School, then held a federal appeals court clerkship, followed a year later by a clerkship with Supreme Court Justice (now Chief Justice) William Rehnquist.
He then was named special assistant to the U.S. attorney general, and associate counsel to the president (at age 27) before joining one of Washington's top law firms. Then Roberts went to the office of the solicitor general of the United States and, for the past two years, a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
The point: Nothing in that glide path suggests exposure to anything that might temper his conservative philosophy with real-life exposure to the problems and concerns of ordinary men and women. Roberts is undeniably bright, said my friend, but his life has been one of quite extraordinary privilege.
And then it occurred to me: Roberts's life has been amazingly like that of the man who wants to put him on the court -- but with better grades.
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