I am authorized
to announce that few outside Washington and other fever-ridden
outposts of political excess give more than a faint hoot about
Washington leak stories -- however highly the national media esteem
such stories.
I am also
authorized -- more than that, inspired -- to note that we in red-state
America care a lot about whether the U.S. Supreme Court gets turned
around.
We note
that President Bush's nomination of Samuel Alito to the Sandra
O'Connor seat on the Supreme Court points in the direction of
turnaround.
In other
words, Judge Alito, of the Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals,
is a recognized critic of judicial overreaching. Any jurist whom
Sen. Harry Reid would warn Bush not to appoint seems just the
kind of jurist we need on the Supreme Court. If Bush has to make
someone unhappy, let it be those senators and mouthpieces -- Reid,
for instance, and Ralph Neas of the People for the American Way
-- who cease showing their teeth only when the president does
things exactly their way.
The conservative
rap on Bush for nominating Harriet Miers to the job was that,
essentially, he was playing games. If Reid and Co. didn't know
a lot of good about the lady, similarly they didn't know a lot
of bad. Maybe they would confirm her.
On this
one Bush came a cropper. But not on the nomination that followed
-- that of Alito. (It seems worth mentioning that the much-castigated
Miers, as White House counsel, worked professionally, even sacrificially,
in vetting Alito. The lady is due some as yet-undistributed credit
in the character department.)
Back, briefly,
to the indictment of poor Lewis Libby for getting caught (allegedly)
at dissembling when asked by the special prosecutor whether he
had helped put out in the public domain the name of a supposedly
undercover CIA employee married to a critic of the Iraq war. Carl
Bernstein, of Watergate fame, is presently foretelling the "implosion"
of the Bush administration. All one can say is: Huh?
It is plain
Libby should not have lied -- if lie he did -- to the special
prosecutor. It should be equally plain that whether he lied, and
deserves punishment, is a question extraneous not just to the
outcome of the Iraq war but to the whole range of national concerns,
from immigration to inflation to energy policy and airline bankruptcies.
Though you would not have known it last week from the media's,
and the politicians', relentless focus on the question. Washington
Post media critic Howard Kurtz asks: "[A]re reporters,
commentators, bloggers and partisans using the outing of Valerie
Plame as a proxy war for rehashing the decision to invade Iraq?"
You could get that impression, couldn't you?
One hates
to generalize. One also hates not to inquire what all this has
to do with the price of eggs. With our freedoms, that is to say;
with our foreign policy, our economic aims, our culture. I don't
think we have to call such a story wholly barren of significance.
Nor do we have to salivate over it, as though it were the only
big thing going on.
By contrast,
a Supreme Court nomination is certifiably large stuff. This is
due to the justices' propensity for inserting themselves into
our most vexed national conversations: prayer, human life, gay
rights, and so on and so on.
Alito, when
the nomination news came down, was shelled instantly by the Left
for his supposed "pro-life" outlook. What "pro-life"
outlook? I wonder. The judge's record is pro-choice: That is,
pro letting democracy instead of judges choose urgent outcomes.
A court
that defers, when possible, to the citizens and resists the temptation
to take over the proceedings is a court worth fighting for. In
the outposts of political excess, the boo birds can trill their
outrage; but George W. Bush, by naming Sam Alito to the high court,
may yet drown them all out.
