California Conservative

Susan Sullivan, who is a San Francisco attorney and who describes herself as a “social progressive…a card-carrying member of the ACLU and a liberal pro-choice advocate who supports abortion rights…[in] favor [of] gun control, support gay marriage and oppose the death penalty…[and who wouldn't] have a problem if you want to take “God” out of the Pledge of Allegiance”, says that she doesn’t want Judge Alito to be filibustered. In her guest column for the conservative Townhall.com, she says:

“…what scares me is not the prospect of having Sam Alito on the Supreme Court; what scares me is the way my fellow liberal Democrats are behaving in response to the nomination. I’m appalled and embarrassed by the fear mongering, the personal attacks and what I see as an irresponsible and misleading distortion of his real judicial record as well as his character. Now the threat of a filibuster lurks, and Senator Kennedy’s tirade about documents being concealed seems like little more than a pretext to justify such a threat.”

With that paragraph, she essentially takes Sens. Kennedy and Durbin to the proverbial woodshed for “the fear mongering, the personal attacks” they’ve leveled against Judge Alito. The reason for her being upset it twofold: (a) He clerked for Judge Alito in 1990-91 and knows that this isn’t an accurate depiction of Sam Alito, the man and (b) because:

If Democrats’ attempts to filibuster Alito prove successful, because some Republicans are reluctant to change the long-standing rules of the Senate. Consequently, Alito’s nomination fails. Check! In his place, President Bush then nominates a true conservative ideologue. We Democrats would most certainly and desperately want to filibuster such a choice but would be unable to do so because now those same Republicans who were reluctant to change the rules beforehand, would be frustrated by what they would see as Democrats’ serial filibustering, and so they would now exercise the “constitutional” option and change the rules. No filibuster and we liberals end up with a super conservative justice on the court. Check mate! Now that’s the really scary outcome.

In other words, she’d rather take her chances with the Alito she knows than take the risk that the next judge nominated is a “super conservative.”

At the end of the day, Sullivan is asking Senate Democrats to do something that they haven’t shown a capacity to do: exercise restraint and fight the good fight when it comes to the next nominee.

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRing

This entry was posted on Friday, January 13th, 2006 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Activism, Author: Gary Gross, Judiciary, Law, Liberals. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.