New Frontiers In Hackdom
By You would think that Hugh Hewitt would have enough self-respect to dial his abject shilling for the Bush Administration down to, say, an 8 when writing for the New York Times. You would be wrong. And yet, everyone seems to be focusing on the (admittedly roll-on-the-floor hilarious) claim that the Swift Boat Vet Republican Party has never before used “exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources.” But the remarkable thing is, the op-ed consists pretty much entirely of arguments like this; I guess it falls to me to note the other gems. Marvel at the man who would try to pass off something so baldly stupid on a national audience, and the debased standards of the newspaper that would print it:
OVER the last two elections, the Republican Party regained control of the United States Senate by electing new senators in Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, Missouri, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota and Texas. These victories were attributable in large measure to the central demand made by Republican candidates, and heard and embraced by voters, that President Bushs nominees deserved an up-or-down decision on the floor of the Senate.
There are two rather major problems with the claim that the Republican principle that judicial appointees deserve an “up-or-down” vote where a major factor in the Republican takeover of the Senate. The first is that the Republicans don’t believe in any such principle, and this was particularly obvious before the 2000 elections:
In his 1997 year-end report to Congress on the federal judiciary, the Chief Justice pointed out that by the end of 1997, one in ten seats on the federal judiciary were vacant, twenty-six of them had been vacant for at least eighteen months, and a third of the seats on the Ninth Circuit were vacant. He rebuked his fellow conservatives for “serious delays in the appointment process,” a tactic that he said was threatening the nation’s “quality of justice.” “The Senate is surely under no obligation to confirm any particular nominee,” Rehnquist wrote, “but after the necessary time for inquiry it should vote him up or down. In the latter case, the president can then send up another nominee.” Senate Republicans backed away from their stall tactics and the backlog of vacancies eased up in 1998.
But in 1999, as the 2000 election loomed, Republicans again slowed down the confirmation process. Despite Attorney General Meese’s claim that President Reagan’s judicial appointments would “institutionalize the Reagan revolution so it can’t be set aside no matter what happens in future presidential elections,” President Clinton—just ten years after Reagan left office—was close to appointing a new majority on the federal bench. Senate Republicans wanted to prevent that, and they hoped that a Republican president would be elected in 2000 to fill any remaining vacancies that they managed to keep open.
And, of course, in particular, there’s the classic example of the Republicans suddenly abandoning the blue slip rule…after having actively used it throughout the Clinton years to block “up-or-down” votes. So, Hewitt’s claim that the Republicans have always supported “up-or-down” votes for judicial nominees is a claim of breathtaking dishonesty. But even if the claim was true, it would still be risible. Upwards of 90% of the American public can’t even name the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. To argue that obscure procedural rules governing appointments to lower federal courts played any kind of significant role in shifting control of the Senate provides good evidence that you know absolutely nothing about voting behavior, but nothing else.
And then he turns his Bush-whoring on the somewhat more principled people in his own party who had the temerity the President’s decision to nominate a patently unqualified crony to the Supreme Court, with similar results:
The Miers precedent cements an extraconstitutional new standard for nominees. Had the framers intended only judges for the court, they would have said so. No doubt some Miers critics will protest a willingness to support nominees who have never sat on the bench, but no president is going to send one forward after this debacle.
Now, very atypically for Hewitt, the literal claim that the Constitution doesn’t require Supreme Court justices to have served as judges is accurate, although his attribution of the argument that nobody without experience as a judge could be appointed to the Court to his opponents is not. The problem, of course, is that the Constitution doesn’t specify any qualifications for a Supreme Court justice–any standard that one uses to evaluate Supreme Court nominees would constitute an “extraconstitutional new standard.” To demand that someone be literate, more than 10 years old, or not think that the 14th Amendment reinforced rather than overturned Dred Scott–according to Hewitt, if the framers had wanted to make these qualifications for serving on the Court they would have said so. Therefore, to apply any standards at all to the President’s judicial appointments is an illegitimate “extraconstitutional standard,” so the only alternative is to support literally anybody nominated by the President*, QED. Frankly, it’s unclear why, under Hewitt’s logic, the framers bothered to give the Senate “Advice and Consent” powers at all. (*Offer void during Democratic Administrations.)
As Dan Nexon asks over at Crooked Timber, “[i]s it logically possible for “ideal types” (e.g., an “ideal-typical hack”) to exist, or is Hugh Hewitt an analytical construct pretending to be a blogger?” I lean toward the latter theory. And there’s another question–is there anything the New York Times op-ed page wouldn’t publish? I’m certainly no fan of the LA Times “Wikitorial,” but when Pinch Sulzberger claims that “[w]e’re not going to open our pages to random people without our having looked at it,” one wonders what the value-added is when Gail Collins apparently applies no more standards than Hugh Hewitt would apply to the judicial appointments of George Bush. There are a lot of intelligent conservatives who would make arguments not larded with comically transparent falsehoods and arguments that would have to gain several levels of plausibility to rise to the level of being “specious”; can’t the Times start looking for some?