President Bush is the weakest he's ever been in his five years as president, and so, naturally, his Halloween-morning nomination of conservative Judge Samuel Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court was dressed up as a show of strength. It was meant to spook Democrats with its audacity, and provoke them into an ideological battle that Bush's advisers claim he will win handily.
That Bush would desire an ideological battle at this moment is only natural, given how poorly his other battles are going. His fight to get his close confidante Harriet Miers approved to fill retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's spot on the U.S. Supreme Court cost him the support of many in his right-wing base and caused him no small amount of embarrassment. As that was happening, the CIA leak scandal took down a top White House aide, the Iraq war took its 2,000th American life, and a new poll showed 55 percent of Americans view Bush's presidency as a failure.
The ideological battlefield has been good to Bush over the years, and so by shifting back to that terrain he no doubt hopes to find firmer footing for a presidency that has been slipping. The problem for him will be that Democrats are also at a sink-or-swim political moment. As they prepare for the 2006 midterm elections, the Democrats desperately need a victory that shows they can not only stand up to a vulnerable Bush, but also beat him and Congressional Republicans at their own ideological game.
Fortunately for the Democrats, much of the debate over Alito, who has been nicknamed "Scalito" because of his close ideological resemblance to archconservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, will turn on the issue of abortion. In 1991, when Alito was a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, he wrote that women should have to tell their husbands before getting an abortion, an idea that Justice O'Connor, whom he hopes to replace, would later describe as an "undue burden" on women's rights. That "Scalito" would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade seems a given (his mother recently told reporters that "of course" he is against abortion). With this, Democrats may have found their way to win back the ideological high ground. A majority of Americans support a woman's right to choose. If the Democrats filibuster or otherwise defeat Alito's nomination over the abortion issue they will have positioned themselves, and not Republicans, as defenders of the values of mainstream America.
eli@thestranger.com
