Bashing Bush for playing fighter pilot gives Democrats a momentary sugar high, but it’s a downer for the party. “We look petty, and we’re way off message,” says the strategist. “We should be roasting them on their tax plan. Instead we’re talking about how much less it would have cost to fly him in a helicopter.”
Bush’s Republican defender on TV asserted the cost savings would have been a mere $7. Whether that’s true or not, it got said on national television, and a lot of people will take it as gospel.
In the Senate, the Democrats’ elder statesmen, 85-year-old Robert Byrd, lambasted Bush for dishonoring the memories of the more than 100 servicemen and women who died in Iraq by turning the military into props for his reelection campaign. Byrd isn’t doing his party any favors by speaking his mind, even though many, if not most, Democrats share his revulsion at Bush’s behavior. One joke making the rounds is that the Republicans are going to make a movie about Bush’s war record. It’s called “Thirty Seconds Over Austin,” a play on the 1944 movie starring Spencer Tracy, “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.”
Any embarrassment Bush might suffer over his spotty military record in real life (between May 1972 and October 1974 he was absent from duty with the Air National Guard) would be deeply satisfying to Democrats. But that’s not enough. Democrats need to stand for something that matters to voters and then fight “until the last dog dies,” as Bill Clinton used to say. Such a battle is underway in the Senate as Democrats prepare to wage simultaneous filibusters against three Bush nominees for federal appeals-court openings.
It’s up to the Democrats to make the case that this is important. Most people’s eyes glaze over when the subject turns to judges. They’re not celebrities like Judge Judy, but they serve a lifetime, and they influence every aspect of society from women’s rights and the environment to labor law and campaign-finance reform. Beginning with the Reagan presidency in 1980, Republicans have made a concerted effort to populate the courts with judges sympathetic to a conservative agenda. Reagan-Bush-Bush appointees dominate eight of the country’s 13 circuit courts; three have a Democratic majority, and two are equally divided between the parties.
Bush’s appointees are openly ideological, and many have deep roots in the Republican Party. Several have run for office as Republicans. Many are members of the Federalist Society, an avowedly conservative group. One was a state director of the Rutherford Institute, which represented Paula Jones in her sexual-harassment suit against Clinton. A recent Senate hearing on the nomination of James Leon Holmes of Arkansas is illustrative. As Democrat Charles Schumer read aloud from articles written by Holmes and his wife for religious magazines, the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee–all white men with gray hair, an aide notes–sat silently with their eyes cast downward. “It’s almost as though they were ashamed,” says the aide. The source of their dismay was a 1997 article for Arkansas Catholic magazine in which Holmes advanced the position that “the wife is to subordinate herself to her husband,” and “the woman is to place herself under the authority of the man.” It’s not the kind of rhetoric that appeals to soccer moms.
In another article, Holmes dismissed concerns that a constitutional ban on abortion would make it hard for rape victims to get the procedure. “Concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami,” Holmes asserted. According to the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, each year more than 30,000 women in American become pregnant because of rape or incest. Miami experiences snow about once every hundred years. Holmes has since retracted his statement, explaining that he read it somewhere and assumed it was true.
It’s been two years since Bush first named Miguel Estrada as a candidate for the D.C. District Court. A Honduran-born Harvard grad, Estrada has a first-rate mind and a stellar resume. But Democrats are blocking his appointment because he refuses to make his views known on controversial social issues, and the suspicion is that he’s a hard-right ideologue. Democrats are also mounting filibusters against two other Bush appointees, Texas judge Priscilla Owen and California judge Carolyn Kuhl.
Owen’s opposition to reproductive rights and her rigid interpretation of the Texas parental-notification law form the basis for the Democrats’ dissent. Opposition to Kuhl centers on her role as a young lawyer in Reagan’s Justice Department wanting to push the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and more recently, her position in a case having to do with the privacy of a breast-cancer patient in the presence of a drug-company salesman. Kuhl ruled that no right to privacy existed since the patient, who was embarrassed and confused, didn’t ask questions and object when her doctor brought in the salesman and examined her in his presence. These nominees are “ideologically insane almost” says a Democratic aide.
Democrats are almost as angry at their leaders for not standing up to Bush as they are at Bush for his exploitation of the war, and his manipulation of the domestic agenda. Democrats can’t stop Bush’s tax cuts; they don’t have the votes. But they can slow his takeover of the courts.
