No, not Gonzales!

By Aussiegirl

Bob Novak has the rundown on potential Supreme Court nominees and the opposition in conservative circles against the rumored nomination of Alberto Gonzales. Looks like white men over 60 need not apply -- the president is looking for a politically correct nominee of the right sex or racial background.

George Bush now seems to have morphed into the original affirmative action president. I've got nothing against nominees of whatever persuasion as long as they are the most qualified person around. But it's beginning to look like the administration is not even considering candidates who are not politically correct in terms of race or sex.

Why, for instance, should the replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor be necessarily a woman?

And what's wrong with being over 60? Today a 60 year old is still a young person. Personally, the older these justices the better, as far as I'm concerned -- that will keep them from serving on the court for way too long as is presently the case. All we need is a bad justice on there for 30 years or more. At least nominating an old person puts SOME sort of a term limit on their tenures.

It was not merely a leak from the normally leak-proof Bush White House. For more than a week, a veritable torrent has tipped Attorney General Alberto Gonzales as President Bush's first nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. It has sent the conservative movement into spasms of fear and loathing.

For example, why the torrent of Gonzales leaks from a White House extraordinarily adept at holding back the president's intended nominations? It looks like a trial balloon, but there are also suspicions that Gonzales's name has been floated by critics in order to shoot him down.

. . . Conservatives fear Gonzales will be another in a long line of Supreme Court justices who have proved more liberal than the president who appointed them expected -- John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter. That is a view widely held inside the White House, but not by the occupant who counts most.

George W. Bush loves Al Gonzales and would like his former chief counsel to head a "Gonzales Court."

White men over 60 need not apply -- move to the back of the bus -- who imagined that the Bush administration would be the biggest proponent of affirmative action?

The White House has sent word that two favorites of the conservative movement -- Appellate Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson (4th Circuit, Richmond, Va.) and former Solicitor General Theodore Olson -- are ineligible because they are over 60. The two current favorites are Appellate Judges John Roberts (D.C. Circuit) and J. Michael Luttig (4th Circuit).

But sources report Rehnquist is not ready to resign and that O'Connor is readying the way for a return to Arizona with her invalid husband. While Bush would consider replacing one of the court's two women with its first Hispanic justice, neither Roberts nor Luttig for O'Connor would be politically correct.

Oh heavens, let's not be politically incorrect! You have to have a minority or a woman -- this is the Republican party?

Accordingly, White House judge-hunters are looking for a woman. They have interviewed Appellate Judge Edith Brown Clement (5th Circuit, New Orleans), a conservative who flies under the radar. She was confirmed as a Louisiana district judge in 1991, seven weeks after her nomination by the first President Bush, and was confirmed as an appellate judge in 2001, two and a half months after George W. Bush named her.