"...a lunge for the lifeboat by an embattled president ..."

WP
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101256.html?referrer=email

President Pushover

By David S. Broder

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

Under other circumstances, President Bush's choice of Judge Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court would have been seen as a bold move by a strong president with a clear policy objective. By choosing a man of superior intellectual heft and an indelible record of conservative views on major social issues, Bush would have been challenging his critics on the Democratic side to test their arguments in an arena where everything favored him: a Republican Senate.

But after the fiasco of the Harriet Miers nomination and the other reversals of recent days and weeks, the Alito nomination inevitably looks like a defensive move, a lunge for the lifeboat by an embattled president to secure what is left of his political base. Instead of a consistent and principled approach to major decision making, Bush's efforts look like off-balance grabs for whatever policy rationales he can find. The president's opponents are emboldened by this performance, and his fellow partisans must increasingly wonder if they can afford to march to his command.

None of this is to suggest that Judge Alito will be -- or should be --blocked from elevation to the seat of Sandra Day O'Connor. His record entitles him to the serious consideration and questioning he will undoubtedly receive from the Judiciary Committee. But after Bush acquiesced in the conservative movement's uproar denying Miers her chance for an up-or-down Senate vote, or even a hearing in that committee, there is no plausible way the White House can insist that every major judicial nominee deserves such a vote.

That was the rationale behind the threatened "nuclear option" in the Senate, the mid-session rule change that would have banned judicial filibusters. If the mass of Democrats and a few Republicans who may be dismayed by Alito's stands on abortion and other issues can muster the 41 votes needed to sustain a filibuster under current rules, they now have precedent for using their power.

Can the conventional wisdom be turning against him at long last? Or will the rest of the presstitutes just figure that the Dean of Washington Punditry just went off the reservation for a column?

but it could be a step.

If ever there was a column by him indicating he's fed up with Bush, this one is it.

to change the subject from Libby and the investigation

stick us with a rightwing SC justice with a lifetime appt.