The American Spectator

You’re kidding, right? As someone who was involved from the White House end of the failed Bork confirmation, I must say the Bush administration and, almost more importantly, the conservative movement in general, learned exactly the right lesson from the Bork fight. To wit: fight back. Step One of this lesson? Nominate a conservative with a real track record. Step Two: raise our own money, organize our own grass-roots groups and do our own TV commercials. Step Three: Run on this issue to elect even more conservative senators.

All of this was done by the Bush administration — and they succeeded. You, Senator, in breaking the traditional bipartisan process have energized a conservative base that is fired up over this issue beyond belief. In case you don’t believe this, take a look at the Pennsylvania Senate race for Rick Santorum. The Democrat Senate nominee quickly stepped away from you and your Committee colleagues, endorsing both Judge Roberts and Judge Alito. The only way he apparently believes he can win is by portraying himself as conservative when it comes to judicial nominees.

Sadly, when I see you condemn Chief Justice Roberts for opposing the idea of “divvying us up by race” I must say your 43 years on the Judiciary Committee seems not to have gotten either you or your party very far on this issue. “[R]ace has no place in American life or law,” said President Kennedy in his historic 1963 address on Civil Rights. This sentiment, expressed vividly by Chief Justice Roberts in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry is the recognition that President Kennedy had it just right.

What is left unsaid in that opinion, and frankly what was left unsaid in President Bush’s recent remarks to the NAACP, is that race is still about “divvying us up” because you and your party, Senator, have made dividing Americans by race a fine political art. For the record, it is your party — not mine — that has supported slavery, segregation, and every form of racial division it is possible to create since the very formation of your party. Democrats from Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson to — yes — John F. Kennedy, were elected because they depended on the votes of a system that both supported and sustained racial preferences in one manner or another. The very fact that America needed civil rights legislation at all in the 1960s is because your party actively sabotaged the same Republican legislation a hundred years earlier — subjecting African-Americans to decades and decades of racial terror for nothing more than political gain.

So what to do about reform? How about resigning from the Senate Judiciary Committee?

Now THAT would be a big step forward in restoring the process that you yourself believe was working when you first took your seat in one of those leather swivel chairs 43 years ago.

Isn’t it time to connect the dots?