Is Bush telling conservatives to shut up?

By Aussiegirl

Bob Novak echoes conservative concerns regarding the president's vigorous and very personal defense of "his friend" Alberto Gonzales. With the possibility of a Rehnquist resignation within a week, all eyes are on Bush and the nominees he will put forth.

So far conservatives aren't feeling too confident in the president's choices. Again I find it curious that the president expressed himself with such vehemence and personal pique which he directed at conservatives -- a vehemence he has never directed towards democrats and their many obstructive and offensive tactics.

The president's calls for "toning down the rhetoric" sound ominously as though he's telling the people who elected him that they now have no right to lobby and express their opinions when it comes to one of the main reasons most of them voted for him -- judicial nominations.

What is a democracy if the people are told to -- in effect - shut up and let the big boys in charge handle things without you, the pesky public, getting involved. That strikes me as an exceptionally elitist and undemocratic point of view.

Conservatives who have spent more than a decade planning for this moment to change the balance of power on the Supreme Court are reeling from blows delivered by two dissimilar political leaders: Edward M. Kennedy and George W. Bush.

Sen. Kennedy has succeeded with the news media in establishing a new standard of "mainstream conservatism" for a justice. President Bush has put forth "friendship" as a qualification for being named to the high court.

Bush is by far the bigger obstacle in the way of a conservative court. While Kennedy's ploy presents a temporary problem, Bush's stance could be fatal. The Right's morale was devastated by the president's comments in a USA Today telephone interview published on the newspaper's front page Tuesday: "Al Gonzales is a great friend of mine. When a friend gets attacked, I don't like it." Bush is a stubborn man, who sounded like he might really nominate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in the face of deep and broad opposition from the president's own political base.

. . . If a Rehnquist vacancy now is thrown into the mix, will Bush be tempted to temporize by naming one conservative and one non-conservative? If he nominates conservative Justice Antonin Scalia as chief justice and thus creates a third confirmation, will he think he has escaped by saying he has named two conservatives? No such maneuvers will make Gonzales acceptable to the Bush base.

Consequently, Bush's USA Today interview has been a source of intense anxiety on the Right. Typically, the president did not defend Gonzales on his merits but with outrage that anybody would dare criticize his friend. That reflects a general schoolboy attitude that is losing the president support from fellow Republicans and conservatives.
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The Founding Fathers put the Senate "advise and consent" clause into the Constitution partly to combat cronyism. In Federalist No. 76, Alexander Hamilton opposed the president's nominees "being in some way or other personally allied to him." Thus, the wonder in Washington is that a peeved Bush would defend Gonzales's selection on grounds of personal pique. So much is at stake in these Supreme Court nominations that surely the president must realize this situation transcends loyalty to a friend.