“Senator Specter’s a man of his word. We’ll take him at his word,” White House political adviser Karl Rove said on Fox News Sunday yesterday, about the controversy surrounding Arlen Specter’s previously assumed ascension to the post of Judiciary Committee chairman.
”We’ll take him at his word.” That works.
Rove was accepting Specter’s statement assuring Republicans that he will not have a litmus test–and has never had a litmus test–for judges.
But that was Specter’s telling-Senate-Republicans-what-they-wanted-to-hear backtracking word the day the heat was turned up on him in the form of colleague pressure and jammed Senate phone lines. That’s not what conservatives should be paying most attention to when considering who the next Senate Judiciary Committee chairman should be.
Conservatives should take Specter at his other word–his words to reporters the morning after his reelection (and that of the president, to whom he owes his seat), and his words to a home-state editorial board during his reelection campaign.
In October, in their endorsement of Specter’s Senate reelection bid, the editors of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote: “Before the Post-Gazette editorial board, he promised that no extremists would be approved for the bench.”
“Extremists” of course, are anyone who would upset the Post-Gazette editorial board, Maureen Dowd, People for the American Way…you get the idea. (And if you have any doubt about what Specter meant by extremist, see this fundraising letter, in which he designates Bush-Cheney 2004 adviser Ralph Reed as such–that is, as one of those backward pro-life types.) Ask Robert Bork, too, whom Arlen Specter considers an extremist. (Specter opposed Bork’s Supreme Court nomination.)
The liberal Post-Gazette wrote: “The best argument for [Specter] staying on is his seniority, which puts him in line to be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In that capacity, he would be in a position to block some of the ideologically extreme federal judges likely to be nominated by President Bush in a second term, some of them for the Supreme Court.”
The Post-Gazette view of a Specter chairmanship is pretty realistic: As a lame-duck who has already shown no hesitation to “warn” the president through the media (he did so again on Face the Nation yesterday, noting that the president did not win a mandate on Election Day), he will be free to make ex-senator Tom Daschle, former leader of the bully-the-Bush-judges pack, proud.
There is no reason the GOP should surrender their Election Day win to Arlen Specter and the Left. Oh, and by the way, that’s not intolerance (the New York Times is undoubtedly soon to editorialize that it is); it is practical politics. Conservatives ought to act like the governing majority they are–before they aren’t.
–Kathryn Jean Lopez is editor of National Review Online.