This whole Senate/Court thing is pure politics on both sides. The only real question is whether the Rep or Dems can milk the refusal for more Hispanic votes.

Overall, blockage by either side is a good thing, because no truly conservative judge can get past any of the Senators. (Thanks, Arlen!)

So the best achievable outcome is to clog up the Federal courts so thoroughly that the Commies and Saddammies will have to seek some other way to impose their totalitarian rules. This might slow them down just a bit.

Estrada’s crime wasn’t that he was Hispanic, but that he was a conservative. If he were pro-Roe and pro-affirmative action, he’d been serving for over a year.

At first, it might have been because he’s an Hispanic conservative and liberals were keeping a guy who would be a likely Supreme Court pick later in the decade from getting any traction, but the blockage of Anglo conservatives from appealate spots makes that less likely.

Strange thing is, we often hear group-identity types complain about the lack of “role models” for the young members of their ethnic group.

So, they savaged Clarence Thomas, and they’ve blocked Miguel Estrada, and now they’re blasting away at California State Supreme Court justice Janice Rogers Brown.

Either they want what’s best for “their people,” or they want what’s best for the Democratic Party. If the latter, then they need to stop pretending that they speak for “their people.”

There is more to the Estrada/Owens/Pryor/Pickering fight than race, though it was a big factor in Estrada’s case. The Dems simply can’t afford to lose Hispanics, and can’t afford to let even a moderate conservative on the bench or their myriad yapping interest groups will withhold campaign cash.

But the larger issue involved is legitimacy. The Dems simply don’t accept Bush as the legitimate president, and express that through their actions with regard to the presidential power of nominating members to the federal bench. Bush needs, desperately, to make a stand on this issue. Allowing Estrada to fall has deeply wounded the Constitutional presidential authority over the nominations process, has alienated his conservative base which counted on him to appoint constructivists to the courts, and has wounded the federal court system itself. All of this is fine with the Dems; their disregard for Constitutional order is palpable, as is their hatred for Bush specifically and conservatives generally. But it isn’t fine for the country. Bush must make a stand. It’s time to be a divider, and by dividing, conquer.

Good to see conservatives playing racial identity politics, too! Switch the word “Democrat” for “Republican” in Bryan’s post and I’d think I was listening to Louis Farrakhan.

And for those who come to Bryan’s defense by saying he’s only pointing out the racism of Liberals, all I have to say is that Bryan made the post and used the race card - not some liberal.

One either rejects racial politics or embraces it. With his sweeping general accusation of racism based solely on political ideology, Brian chose to embrace it. Bad choice.

I’m merely pointing out what’s going on. Race is a factor in the Estrada mess, as it was in the Thomas mess years ago. But it’s quite a leap to turn that into “embracing identity politics.” But leap all you want, Jimmy. It’s a high cliff.

Bryan - I beg to differ. Your post was not “merely pointing out what’s going on.” You are basically accusing all Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee of racism just because they filibustered Estrada’s nomination. You are reinforcing race (“He’s Hispanic”) as the defining issue of his nomination. That is racial politics. I see no difference between that and what someone like Louis Farrakhan would do if the situation were reversed. And if calling just one person - not to mention a whole cadre of people - racist without any evidence of racism other than your opinion on the filibuster of a guy who happens to be Hispanic, if that is not embracing racial politics, then what do you call it? I’d love to know, because I bet your answer would sound a lot like a rationalization Farrakhan would mount.

Let’s see. The Dems embrace Robert Byrd (former Klansman) and Fritz Hollings (who raised the Confederate flag over South Carolina in the 60s). In Georgia, a Dem running for state office actually ran on the Confederate flag as his centerpiece issue in 2002—he wanted to bring it back! The Dems played filibuster games with Estrada and tried to lynch Clarence Thomas (a man they continue to hate, almost purely because he’s a black conservative). Cruz Bustamante refuses to denounce his MEChista past (MEChA is a militant Chicano separatist organization), and the Dems are utterly silent.

I’m just pointing out what’s going on. If a Republican was guilty of any of these things, people like you would demand his or her head on a platter. And you’d play guilt by association and smear all Republicans just for fun. That’s how you guys operate. I’m just pointing it out.

Tarring me with Farrakhan—nice try, but no cigar. And if you’d won one, I have some fine ones to offer.

You still haven’t refuted my basic point about your post: it levels the charge of racism exclusively as the basis for political behavior. Quite frankly, whether you are right or wrong about your charge (I think you are wrong) is ultimately beside the point. You are playing the racial politics game. You are making Estrada’s race the “sine qua non” about his nomination. Your diatribe against Robert Byrd, Fritz Hollings, and the like - as racist as they may be - and the silence of liberals on their racist past - is also beside the point about YOUR post. Saying that I would want to have a Republican’s head on a platter if he even sniffed of Byrd or Hollings is also beside the point - even though it is wrong. (If you will remember, on this very blog - I came to Strom Thurmond’s defense when Andrew Sullivan showed a reprehensible lack of respect upon Thurmond’s death for this public servant’s life work.) You can point the finger and say liberal democrats hold a racial politics double standard. Fine. But that still doesn’t get YOU off the hook for playing the race card - especially since you despise the racial politics game when liberals play it so unabashedly. As the saying goes: two wrongs don’t make a right. They just are two wrongs. You chose to fight an evil fire with the same evil fire. Again, bad choice.

It’s a shame I don’t smoke, because I think I’d really enjoy a fine quality cigar.

Mr. Huck;

I must disagree with your basic thesis. If liberals play the race card, that means that conservatives can’t accuse them of doing so without being hypocrits? In this view, it seems that any criticism is automatically hypocritical. That seems rather limiting.

If we assume for the purposes of argument that Mr. Preston is right, that opposition to the Estrada nomination was because he was a conservative Hispanc, how could Mr. Preston hold the opposition to account without being branded by you as a hypocrit?

I would not take issue at all with Bryan if he were only criticizing the democrats for playing the race card. But that’s not what Bryan was doing. He wasn’t criticizing - he was basically calling ALL of the democratic senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee racists simply because of the filibuster. That’s precisely the behavior I think Bryan despises when liberals do it to conservatives. All you need to do is substitute the word “republican” for “democrat” in Bryan’s post, and imagine it coming out of the mouth of Jesse Jackson, and you should be able to see what I mean.

Quite frankly, I don’t care if Bryan’s accusation were correct (and he’s shown absolutely NO evidence that democratic opposition is linked at all to the fact that Estrada is Hispanic). He used race in an insidious and accusatory way against a whole group of democratic senators without any evidence that any of them are racists. Anyone truly opposed to the racializing of politics should object to this.