He’s Gonna Hold His Breath Til He Turns Blue

Via Liberal Oasis, here’s the latest from rightwing land on the new supreme nomination:

“Shell shocked,” “confused,” “stumbling,” “full of doubt.” These are all words I have heard used to describe the current White House effort to find Sandra Day O’Connor’s replacement. Batchelder, Williams, and Owen have all been interviewed, but the process continues to sputter along.

Several have told me not to buy into the Miers trial balloon. It is, I’m told, just that — a trial balloon. Another tells me, “The President wants Gonzales. That’s what is dragging this thing out. They’re sending out people to say he is conservative as if by telling us that enough we will say, ’sure, he really is one of us.’ That is not going to happen.”

The process is still moving. Those I have talked to in the past twenty-four hours tell me we should expect a minority or woman. The odds are that it will be a woman. Sykes’s name has gotten little play in the past twenty-four hours and Luttig’s name has gotten none. Larry Thompson’s name continues to surface. One person disputes all my sources and tells me that Thompson, not Clement, was the almost pick last time.

The jury is still out on the nominee. Says one from a phone call this morning, “The White House has gone into second guess mode. They want another Roberts, an enigma who will slip through and turn out to be a conservative. They are second guessing their picks. That, I would think, increases the chances of a Thompson or a Gonzales — someone the President’s gut tells him is conservative. My gut tells me we have to keep the pressure on or we’re [screwed].”

They don’t want to put another woman on the court. Not really. The conservative Sandra Day O’Connor, who was personally distraught at the idea that Bush might not have won the 2000 election and made sure he was installed anyway, is now seen as some sort of left wing bra burner on the right. Clearly, women can’t be trusted.

This is not an accident. There is a serious movememnt afoot to denigrate women’s issues, and therefore, pressure Bush not to nominate another woman. Check out this story by Dahlia Lithwick on the “chick-baiting” that’s going on around this supreme court nomination:

A few weeks ago I suggested that race and gender should not be the only—or even the primary—filter through which we consider Supreme Court nominees. I rejected the arguments that minority candidates serve as proxies for minority views (whatever those might be), or that they create the appearance of a court that “looks like America.” I was wrong. We need another woman on the Supreme Court. And while we’re at it we need a few more women on the Senate judiciary committee.

[…]

I wonder why both Ginsburg and O’Connor—who differ on virtually everything—feel so strongly that there should be two women on the Supreme Court that they’d use their offices to publicly urge the president to appoint one.

And I can’t help but wonder if it has anything to do with the ways in which gender politics are starting to infect our discourse about the courts. Consider this commentary by Bruce Fein this week in the Washington Times: Fein lines up Hillary Clinton, Dianne Feinstein, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, then levels potshots at them as believers in Supreme Court justices as “apostles over the law” because of their concern for John Roberts’ positions on women’s and civil rights. Oddly enough, Patrick Leahy, Joseph Biden, Chuck Schumer, Ted Kennedy, and the other male Senate Democrats who called for Roberts’ views in this area are never mentioned.

Mark Steyn is positively bilious about this feminization of the Democrats in the Washington Times on Monday. Again Feinstein (and only Feinstein) is blistered for wanting to hear Roberts “talking to me as a son, a husband and a father.” For which Steyn’s prescription is that she “get off the Judiciary Committee and go audition for ‘Return To Bridges Of Madison County,’ or ‘What Women Want 2’ (‘Mel Gibson is nominated to the Supreme Court but, despite being sensitive and a good listener, is accused of being a conservative theocrat’).”

And here’s George Will this week, also taking his nasty stick to Sen. Feinstein: “Dianne Feinstein’s thoughts on the nomination of John G. Roberts as chief justice of the United States should be read with a soulful violin solo playing, or perhaps accompanied by the theme song of ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show.’ Those thoughts are about pinning one’s heart on one’s sleeve, sharing one’s feelings and letting one’s inner Oprah come out for a stroll.” Will’s contempt for Senate efforts to know something about the next chief justice’s “temperament and values”—to understand his heart—is absolutely laser focused on the senator from California. Odd. Never a mention of Biden, Schumer, Mike DeWine, and Dick Durbin—each of whom similarly deployed the language of hearts and feelings in their questioning of Roberts.

Now, I am not come today to praise Sen. Feinstein. Her performance during those hearings probably set the women’s movement back a decade. From her ingenuous “Now, I’m not a lawyer …” questions to her tendency to turn even declarative sentences into halting questions, she hardly projected the air of mastery and confidence I’ve seen in her in the past. I’m not sure I can sign off on her self-appointed task of representing all 145 million American women at the hearings. I can’t even get behind her efforts to force a clearly private man into vomiting up mawkish personal revelations onto the hearing-room floor.

But I do wonder why it became so very easy to blast only the woman who wanted to cut through Roberts’ repeated claims to be a lean, mean law-making machine. I wonder why the woman who worried about his aloofness and disconnection from poverty or suffering was singled out for derision. Is it because the stereotype of the pathetic, whiny, “but how do you feel” nag fits so much better if the asker is wearing curlers and a housecoat? Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women? Or is it, in the end, the consequence of having only one woman on the committee?

I’m sure it’s just an accident that Fein, Steyn (weird name-coincidence or conspiracy?), and George Will each singled out only Feinstein as their judiciary committee poster-person for the strange quest-for-feeling that characterized the Roberts hearings. But it certainly evokes something Ginsburg mentioned in her remarks yesterday at Wake Forest. According to the report, she noted that “she started in law school in the 1950s—a time when law students and law practitioners were predominantly male. She said she felt pressure to excel, to break the stereotypes about women. … ‘You felt like all eyes were on you. If you gave a poor answer in class, you felt like it would be viewed as indicative of all female students.’ “

Imagine being judged and ridiculed as a lightweight, when—as sole representative of your gender—you feel you must defend the achievement of all women. The solution for both Ginsburg’s problem and Feinstein’s is simple: Give the critics more targets. Load up the courts and Congress with enough women, and then maybe blaming them for being women in the first place will stop sounding like a legitimate critique.

Is it a cynical effort to paint all women as hysterics or merely all Democrats as women?

It’s both. And one follows from the other. Lithwick says she’s sure it’s just a coincidence, but it isn’t. These things don’t come out of nowhere on the right.

One thing I hope that people think a little bit about is that this distaste for women’s issues is one that can easily be internalized on both sides of the political fence. Indeed, it already has in some ways. This, like race, is much simpler for the right to deride than it is for the left to defend. These are complicated issues. Nonetheless, we have no choice. It is the essence of what we stand for — liberty, equality. It doesn’t get much simpler than that.

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