New from Confirmation Tales: "Conservatives Revolt Against Miers Nomination: A resounding no to George W. Bush's 'trust me'" 1/ confirmationtales.com/p/conservative…
“No more Souters!” That was the rallying cry among conservatives in anticipation of Supreme Court vacancies during George W. Bush’s presidency. Those suspicious of the candidacy of Bush’s first White House counsel Alberto Gonzales shared a joke: “You know what the English translation of the Spanish word Gonzales is, right? … Souter.” 2/ confirmationtales.com/p/conservative…
It wasn’t Souter alone who was the problem. Souter stood in for a long line of failed or middling justices appointed by Republican presidents in the preceding decades—Harry Blackmun and John Paul Stevens most prominently, but also Warren Burger, Lewis F. Powell Jr., Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy. 3/ confirmationtales.com/p/conservative…
Conservatives were no longer going to accept a Republican president’s “trust me” assurance on a Supreme Court nominee. The Miers nomination ignited a firestorm of conservative opposition. White House efforts to allay concerns backfired. Meanwhile, Democratic leader Harry Reid was gloating. 4/ confirmationtales.com/p/conservative…
When Souter was nominated in 1990, the conservative legal movement was in its infancy, and the pre-Internet technology was primitive. There was little choice but to hope that White House knew what it was doing. By 2005, the conservative legal movement was flourishing. In George W. Bush’s first term, conservatives had mobilized in support of his lower-court nominees. But they were now showing that their commitment was to the cause, not to Bush personally. The very means—blog posts, coalition calls, emails, Internet petitions, and media ads—that had been deployed in support of Bush’s nominees were now being used to generate and coordinate powerful opposition to the Miers nomination. 5/ confirmationtales.com/p/conservative…