I agree with Matthew Yglesias about a lot of things. His take on Samuel Ferecito....I mean Samuel Alito, is no exception:
After an uninformative confirmation hearing, Alito will be confirmed by a comfortable margin to the general approval of highbrow centrist opinion. He'll proceed to spend the next 20 years on the Court making America a somewhat worse place than it might otherwise be. Conservatives will continue to fail in their efforts to transform the country into some idealized version of the 1950s and will presumably blame this on college professors and Anthony Kennedy.
Also, in the department of Nothing Unusual Here, I think Yglesias's colleague, Garance Franke-Ruta, is off-base:
In now appointing the Princeton- and Yale-educated far-right jurist Samuel Alito to the Court, the president seems determined to create a 21st-century Supreme Court that looks less and less like America and more and more like a mid-20th-century Ivy League eating club.
Franke-Ruta is upset that Bush's pick wasn't a woman. In a sane world, she would have a point. But we live in a world where George fucking Bush is the president. His short-list of females? Edith Jones, Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owen. All right-wing nutcases, all as or more hostile towards the issues Garance cares about, all, I would argue, worse than Alito. Would Franke-Ruta be so upset if Bush had nomintaed Owen? She would implement the same if not more extreme views. But hey, she's got ovaries.
I'm not saying it's not important to have women on the court. But just like the solution to black representation on the court sure as fuck was not Clarence Thomas, the solution to female representation is not anybody on George's shortlist.
Posted by mike at October 31, 2005 10:35 PM