January 12, 2006
Senate’s Liberal Lion Defanged
By Tom
Bevan
Ted Kennedy
threw a tantrum yesterday. In the middle of the second day of
the Judiciary Committee’s questioning of Judge Samuel Alito,
Kennedy demanded the committee go into an executive session to
vote on subpoenaing the private papers of William Rusher, a founding
member of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton (CAP), and then threatened
to disrupt the committee proceedings by repeating the request
over and over until it was recognized.
Chairman
Arlen Specter, clearly surprised and annoyed by Kennedy’s
antics, put the Senior Senator from Massachusetts in his place:
“Well,
Senator Kennedy, I’m not concerned about your threats
to have votes again, again and again. And I’m the chairman
of this committee and I have heard your request and I will consider
it. And I’m not going to have you run this committee and
decide when we’re going to go into executive session.
We
are in the middle of a round of hearings. This is the first
time you have personally called it to my attention, and this
is the first time that I have focused on it. And I will consider
it in due course.”
The exchange
was instructive not only because it showed just how dire things
have become for Senate Democrats trying to stop Samuel Alito’s
ascension to the nation’s highest court, but also for showing
how far the stature of the Senate’s liberal lion has fallen.
Reviews of
Kennedy’s performance in recent days have been less than
kind. On Monday, Michael McGough of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
wrote that Kennedy was “meandering and listless” at
a pre-hearing press conference designed to lay out the case against
Alito. Today Robert Novak describes
Kennedy as “bogged down” and “without focus”
during the first round of questioning on Tuesday.
Yesterday’s
outburst was a far cry from eighteen years ago when Kennedy rushed
to the Senate floor just hours after the nomination of Judge Robert
Bork to deliver the speech that now, even more so than the one
he delivered at the Democratic National Convention in 1980, serves
as a fitting definition of his legacy:
“Robert
Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced
into back-alley abortions, blacks would have to sit at segregated
lunch counters, rogue police would break down citizen’s
doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught
about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the
whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would
be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the
judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights
that are the heart of our democracy.”
In his 2002
biography Square Peg, Senator Orrin Hatch recalled Kennedy’s
tirade against Bork as “a polemical screed, appalling in
tone, in the number of gross misstatements, and in its reliance
on indefensible distortions.” And yet it worked.
Since 1969,
when his presidential hopes drowned alongside Mary Jo Kopechne,
it has always been a pathetic peculiarity of modern American politics
to watch Senator Kennedy indignantly lecture others about ethics
and morality – especially on the occasions when he has simultaneously
engaged in distorting records and smearing reputations.
But things
have changed considerably since the days of Bork. Democrats have
lost 10 seats in the Senate since 1987, going from a 55-seat majority
to a 45-seat minority. Conservatives now enjoy much more media
parity today as well, making the campaign to defeat a nominee
based on distortions much more difficult. And, generally speaking,
a slightly more conservative public seems less inclined to buy
into the same sort of dire, apocalyptic rhetoric Democrats have
used successfully in the past to demonize Republican judicial
nominees.
Nobody has
felt, or suffered, the weight of changes in the electoral landscape
and the resulting shift in the power structure in Washington,
D.C. over the last twenty-five years more than Kennedy. He came
to Washington in November 1962 as the brother of a sitting President
and an Attorney General and as the member of a party that controlled
66 seats in the Senate and had an 83-seat majority in the House
of Representatives. It was the height of both his family’s
and his party’s power, and it has been more or less a downhill
ride ever since.
Today Kennedy
is currently the second longest serving member of the Senate.
He turns 74 next month and will stand for reelection this November,
but Kennedy must be disheartened about the prospect of finishing
his career as a member of the minority. The once powerful liberal
lion of the Senate now sits defanged and declawed in a Judiciary
Committee hearing room, frustrated by the inability to stop what
looks to be the steady march of Samuel Alito to the United States
Supreme Court.
Tom
Bevan is the co-founder and Executive Editor of RealClearPolitics.
