Not as dirty as it sounds. Just ramblings from a law student in Los Angeles who should be studying.
My wife's sister is in town with her two little girls (wife's nieces), ages 7 and 2. My wife and the 7 year old are sleeping in the bedroom. Sister and the baby are in the living room on the fold out couch.
I have been relegated to my office and the futon for the next week. The only saving grace is that I have a whole lotta work to get done and hence, "Uncle Chris" is not to be bothered whilst he is in here.
Since I’m taking 21 units this semester (15 from classes and 6 from my externship)—my ability to blog is severely curtailed. Nevertheless, I’m trying to stay committed to writing approximately 1000 words a night. Since I’m so heavily invested in my studies, most of my posts will be boring law stuff and mostly for my own edification.
That, combined with the fact that I’m taking a Supreme Court Seminar this semester, will result in a whole lot of SCOTUS blogging. And what could be more interesting to a reader than the uninformed ramblings of a 3L expounding on the land’s High Court? Nothing I tell you, nothing!
So let’s get started.
Issue today: What role should the Senate play in Supreme Court appointments?
Art II, Sec 2 grants the President the power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court “with the Advice and Consent of the Senate”—that’s all fine and good, but what the heck does (or should) it mean?
One argument is that the Senate should focus more on the “advice” aspect of it and basically rubber-stamp a President’s nominees. Essentially this leaves the President with full authority to appoint the members of the Court. For my part, I reject this argument or any variations thereof since it seems to me to vest too much power in the Executive. I like my separation of powers, it’s true. But I also like my checks and balances. I am sympathetic to the notion that the Senate must play some role beyond mere acquiescence.
That being said, what’s the proper approach? If “advice” means something more than a blank check—does it mean that the Senate should have the dominant role in the appointment of judges? After all, if the Senate takes too much of an antagonistic role in giving its “advice and consent”—isn’t it serving not so much as a check on Presidential authority, but an obstacle to the proper exercise of it?
It’s the President that has the power to appoint, not the Senate. If every nominee sent up by a President is struck down by the Senate, doesn’t that have the effect of eviscerating the President’s appointment power? On one hand, yes. But on the other, the Senate must have SOME say in the matter if it is to counter unchecked Executive authority.
Some have suggested that the Senate should actively seek to “balance” the court ideologically. If the court is tilting too far in the conservative (liberal) direction, the Senate should work for a nominee that tilts in the liberal (conservative) direction in order to “balance” out the presumed voting blocs that will arise. The goal of this is to present a more diffuse set of opinions and views on legal matters so the Court will not appear monolithic in its legal approach.
I see a couple problems with this. First, even assuming that the nominee that’s intended to “balance” will vote accordingly—a “balanced” court isn’t necessarily a good one. In fact, it’s almost counterintuitive. If you have 4 conservatives, 4 liberals, and 1 moderate, that single justice has the potential to be the deciding vote in a number of cases. That places an enormous amount of power into the hands of a single justice. So rather than have a Court with diverse views and viewpoints, you have two camps pushing harder and harder to accommodate the single swing vote on a case, giving that swing vote a degree of influence over the court’s opinions far beyond its proportional justification. Such a court is no longer “balanced” in any meaningful way since nearly all decisions must now be channeled through a new ideological camp—that of the “moderate.”
The second problem with a focus on “balancing” the Court is that where you have such a split court and a single vote will often decide the issue, you will have numerous 5-4 decisions. While a 5-4 decision is obviously sufficient for the Court at the time, it is far less compelling for a subsequent court. It is far easier to justify overturning a 5-4 decision than it is a 9-0 decision. Not only is it easier to justify, it’s also easier to do. You only need a single justice to switch his/her vote. And given the inexactitude of predicting a nominee’s voting behavior, one can’t be reasonably assured that such narrowly decided cases will stand up in the future.
A third problem is that in such narrow decisions, extreme compromises must often be reached in order to earn that deciding vote. One can say with a fair amount of legitimacy that such “compromise” decisions are not often made of the sternest constitutional stuff. If you’ve got a “living” constitution, you know what you’ve got. If you’ve got a “dead” constitution, you also know what you’ve got. However, when a court starts writing in all sorts of new fangled “balancing tests” and “weighing of factors” and preserving of “central holdings”—it merely breeds a desire on both sides of the judicial philosophy debate to get rid of this hogwash and reassert at least some type of principled constitutional approach. So in an attempt to strike a balance in the Court to presumably ensure some stability in decisions, the Senate has in actuality reduced the likelihood that decisions made under a “balanced” court will last very long.
Another approach is for the Senate to try to push for nominees that better reflect the times and judicial norms of the era in which they live. I guess this means that if we’re in a judicially conservative (liberal) era, the Senate should help reflect those norms and confirm judicially conservative (liberal) nominees. An example of this is during the New Deal—people wanted judges to uphold the New Deal, hence the Senate was obligated (sort of) to respect that desire.
One glaring problem with this is that it can hyper-politicize the nominating process. This approach runs the risk that people will confuse “judicial restraint” or “judicial activism” with reaching a predetermined outcome on a controversial issue. In pushing for nominees that “reflect the times” there is the risk that the judicial norms relied upon will simply be wrong. If the majority of people want the court to rule a certain way on a gay marriage case, is that a policy norm or a judicial norm? Certainly the people want a specific RESULT out of the case—but is the court the best avenue for that result? Might the people merely be expressing their policy goals and the Senate mistakenly interprets this as an expression of their judicial goals? Certainly. If that is the case, then trying to craft a Court that “reflects the times” is a dangerous proposition.
Further, it isn’t all that easy to define what an era’s accepted judicial norms are. Even you do reach agreement; those norms might well be short-lived. If that’s the case, rather than having a Court which reflected the times, you’d have an anachronistic body of a bygone era.
That is my general sense of why the Senate should neither try to “balance” the Court nor have the Court “reflect the times.”
Next time I’ll discuss what the Senate SHOULD try to do when confirming justices.
To MSNBC's Deborah Norville on the Swift Vet Controversy: "The New York Times coverage has been superb."
Quote stolen from this excellent piece in the Weekly Standard outlining Brinkley's increasing flackery.
Zygote Design might have the perfect post illustrating married life.
In the span of a few dozen words it runs the gamut from joy to realization to dissapointment to renewed hope to rejection to resignation.
Read and laugh.
(Via Pennywit) From Slate:From the moment the senator appeared and sat down on the gray sofa where, just last week, Bill Clinton basked in the audience's applause like a cat lapping up cream, Kerry's charisma was less than zero: It was negative. He was a charm vacuum, forced to actually borrow mojo from audience members. He was a dessicated husk, a tin man who really didn't have a heart. His lack of vibrancy, his utter dearth of sex appeal made Al Gore look like Charo.
Yeesh. But the worst part?
And then, when the interview was over and Kerry rose to leave, he caused audible groans in my household by saluting the audience .(emphasis mine) That is just so bad. I mean, really.
Hi. I just accepted an externship offer for a federal District Court judge here in L.A. (Central District of CA) for this semester.
I am happy. (and hopefully, more employable than I have since been)
55 people. Remember that—55 people. I’m happy. (this is a wholly self-congratulatory post and worthless to 99% of the population)
Let me tell you a story. It is a story of a fledgling campus organization. It is one with national support, but at this particular law school, not much of a campus presence to speak of. When I arrived at LLS in 2002, the Federalist Society had about 8 people in it, more or less. And it was more less than more. Of those 8, 6 were graduating. The only two people that were NOT graduating that year were myself and a 2L. Well, we were told that the Fed was a great thing and that we were going to have Ken Starr speak on campus that Spring.
Didn’t happen. In fact, NOTHING happened. We had one meeting in the Fall and one in the Spring. The meeting in the Spring was to elect the new officers for the 2003-2004 school year. As there were only TWO of us not graduating, the election night drama of who would be the President of the Federalist Society came down to the ever popular coin toss.
I lost the coin toss.
So now I’m VP of the Fed. Membership? Two. (we later found a third guy—he became our treasurer). Summer 2003 came and went without much in the way of planning for next year. It was soon to be Student Clubs day, where all the student organizations stake out a table on the Quad to entice students to join. Me and Mr. President agreed to both show up at the appropriate time—he bringing all the relevant information (sign-up sheets, literature, etc)—and we’d go at it.
Well, I show up a little early and discover....nothing. Nobody was there. It was just me representing the Fed and I had not a single bit of information. So I run up to the crappy little office the Administration has been kind enough to not give to some other club (y’know, one with MEMBERS) and grab as many brochures and pocket Constitutions as I can and run back down to our table—which also happens to be in direct sunlight in August in Los Angeles—so it was only a few degrees over Sun.
And how many brochures and Constitutions was I able to find in the office? About 10 of each. So there I am at a bare table with two pieces of nothing literature trying to convince people to give me MONEY for....well....we’ll get back to you on that.
Despite this paltry showing—we had a pretty good year. We put on four events:
We had about 100 people show up for the 2nd Amendment Debate. Turnout averaged about 25 people or so for the other events. But in all, it was a damn sight more impressive than the ZERO events we had the year before. Come our final meeting we had a whopping TWELVE members—a couple even paid DUES! We increased our membership SIXFOLD! (it sounds better that way). Further, we even were able to ADD an officer. We now had a President (me), a VP, a Treasurer, and a Secretary. Though it should be known that nobody ran opposed—we’re not that popular yet.A 2nd Amendment Debate with CATO’s Bob Levy (w/ audio link) David Bernstein’s “You Can’t Say That!” Randy Barnett’s “Restoring the Lost Constitution” LSU’s John Baker on the terrorism cases (w/ audio link).
Here.
My favorite? #4 The Pacifist Cleric
I actually was in a game where a guy tried to play a pacifist bard. Needless to say he did not like the direction the game took.
I can't take it anymore. The story is moving WAY too fast for me. There are too many angles, too many various source documents to look over, too many contradicting accounts (apparently from both sides now).
I simply can't keep up.
Transcript from CNN's Aaron Brown--where John O'Neill, speaking to Richard Nixon, seems to claim that he himself was in Cambodia:The co-author of the book "Unfit for Command," former swift boat commander John O'Neill said Kerry made up a story about being in Cambodia beyond the legal borders of the Vietnam War in 1968.
O'Neill needs to clear this up fairly quickly, I'd imagine.
O'Neill said no one could cross the border by river and he claimed in an audio tape that his publicist played to CNN that he, himself, had never been to Cambodia either. But in 1971, O'Neill said precisely the opposite to then President Richard Nixon.
O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.
NIXON: In a swift boat?
O'NEILL: Yes, sir.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
I have expressed my distaste for the Daily Show before. To reconfirm that opinion, comes this story of John Kerry appearing on Stewart's pile 'o' crap: As Kerry launched into one of his lengthy monologues about why President Bush avoids talking about issues like the economy, jobs and the environment, the comedian interrupted.
Wonder if he'd take such a flippant tone towards Bush re: his DUI? Somehow I doubt it. But hey, no worries, it's not like a presidential candidate has intentionally exaggerated his own military record for opportunistic political gain. It's just those darn Republicans being mean again.
"I'm sorry," Stewart said. "Were you or were you not in Cambodia?"
Stewart and Kerry then lean in and stare each other down over the comedian's desk before Stewart asks about some of the other things Kerry's opponents are saying about him.
As I've said before, Stewart has become what he used to mock: a talking head.
DRUDGE--Dem presidential hopeful John Kerry personally phoned anti-Kerry swift boat vets, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.
Hey, sorry about that whole war criminal, rapist, Ghengis Khan thing...don't know WHAT I was thinking--you know how it is, you stay out late one night before your Senate Testimony, have one tequila too many and WHAM!. So seriously man, my bad.
Bush has denounced the Swift Boad Vets ad...sort of."All of them," Bush said, when asked whether he specifically meant that the veterans' group's advertisement against Kerry should be stopped. "That means that ad, every other ad. Absolutely. I don't think we ought to have 527s. . . . I think they're bad for the system."
As I’ve written before, this sort of reply comes up a little short and still gives Democrats ammunition to wage attacks (albeit really whiny attacks) that Bush hasn’t gone far enough. Of course, Bush need not go so far as to actually ask or demand that the ads be stopped. Since then the Dems would immediately cry “collaboration!” if the Swift Vets DID stop. No, Bush only needs go so far as to mention the Swift Boat Veterans BY NAME.
***
"I think Senator Kerry served admirably, and he ought to be proud of his record,"
It’s simply not enough for Bush to denounce the ad by inference when he condemns all 527s. He needs the soundbite. He needs that single sentence that unequivocally establishes his position on the SBVT ads questioning Kerry’s record. To talk around the matter by claiming he hasn’t seen it or referring to it only as “that ad” just doesn’t work politically.
I know lots of conservatives and Bush supporters think that his universal anti-527 stance is sufficient. It isn’t. For as long as TV viewers can read at the bottom of the screen “Bush has refused to condemn the SBVT ad” or any plausible variant thereof borne of his refusal to mention the group by name—Bush deserves much of the negative press he’s getting.
Do I think all these Democratic attacks could hurt Bush? Perhaps—that’s all the Democrats will try to do in response to the SBVT. And as a political matter, that’s all that matters. So what if the SBVT ads prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Kerry lied his rice-inflected ass off to get his medals and skip out of ‘Nam? If the perception is that this is all part of a smear campaign by Bush, the veracity of the charges won’t mean dink.
Bush and Co. MUST get ahead of this story. For despite all the hard work that excellent bloggers like Beldar and Capt. Ed are putting in, it won’t matter one whit if the NYT can continue to plausibly run stories like this containing lines like: But the White House quickly moved to insist that Mr. Bush had not meant in any way to single out the advertisement run by veterans opposed to Mr. Kerry.
Those sorts of statements can only hurt Bush in the long run and as long as he tries to walk a Kerry-esque line between denouncing all 527 ads without denouncing any, he deserves what he gets for such a “nuanced” (read: dumbass) political strategy.
***
His press secretary, Scott McClellan, said Mr. Bush had not intended to single out the Swift boat advertisement as one that should be stopped.
***
Asked if Mr. Kerry had lied about his war record, Mr. Bush said, "Mr. Kerry served admirably and he ought to be proud of his record.'' But he did not criticize the Swift boat group or address the content of the advertisement.
UPDATE: In response to some of the thoughtful comments left in this thread--I penned a response that was too long so I'm posting it here:
I disagree that Bush doesn't gain by condemning the ad--or at least mentioning them by name. He gains by insulating himself from plausible statements that he has yet to condemn SBVT specifically (as opposed all 527s)
While the Bush haters will continue to whine--they will have far less ammunition or credibility where Bush can point to a clear and unequivocal statement condemning the SBVT by name. Further, the MSM can't continue to write things like the NYT article I mentioned--for in doing so, they make CLEAR their bias (Bush refused to condemn the SBVT ads vs "I condemn the SBVT ads")
If the MSM DOES continue to malign him--which they certainly will, it won't be for that. Which is the point. Bush needs to get distance himself from this story. The SBVT won't listen to Bush and liberal 527 groups will still be there--but Bush has a defense if he can point to an unequivocal statement of condemnation. Further, the SBVT are politically powerful enough that it really won't affect them at all.
Pennywit was kind enough to trackback to this post and offered the following comment (I suppose it’s a criticism):Over time, the circuits have the ability to reach conclusions that occasionally differ, but can be tested and (relatively) easily overruled when they are wrong.
As I understand it, the criticism is that there is no recourse following an incorrect decision in a high court and that this problem of an incorrect decision is compounded by the fact that the court IS inactive and, presumably, less likely to rehear the issue anytime soon; in effect leaving us with a really bad decision for years.
But if the Supreme Court gets a law wrong? It can take years, or even decades, to bring another case that the Supreme Court will find suitable for the purposes of overturning bad precedent.
I think this problem has more to do with the ideological makeup and more importantly, the judicial temperament of the court than it does with its activity or inactivity. As evidence, I’d point to the justification put forth by the Court in Planned Parenthood v Casey.
In essence, the Court in Casey upheld the “central holding” of Roe v Wade despite acknowledging that the case may well have been in error. In a tortured version of stare decisis, the Court held, in part, that overruling Roe was not justified—even if it was in error—because people had “relied” upon the decision for 20+ years. So even though a Court recognizes that the decision whose “central holding” it is upholding may well be flat out wrong as a constitutional matter—it will still retain the decision because people have “ordered their thinking and living around that case.”
That’s as laughable as it is indefensible. Apply the same rationale to Plessy v Ferguson to see just how goofy such reasoning is.
As this relates to Pennywit’s criticism, I think that a judicial philosophy that eschews this sort of stare decisis hogwash cures any criticisms that an otherwise inactive court might cause. A court with this approach would be under no obligation to keep in place an incorrect decision. The Constitution is what must control—not people’s reliance on a faulty interpretation of it. As such, a Court, even an “inactivist” one would not hesitate to overturn a wrongly decided case and even, though it may break my inactivist heart, go so far as to look for a case to serve as a vehicle for such a correction.
This approach to stare decisis is routinely championed by Justice Thomas—whom as a good little conservative Federalist Society president I am—I hold in very high regard. If the decision was wrong the first go-round, nothing justifies its retention.
I got to thinking about this while reading Rehnquist’s book: Is it a good thing that the Court hears so few cases per year?
Out of about 7000 petitions for cert, the Court only hears argument for about 100 each term. By no account is that a substantial (hell, it’s barely a minimal) number. Part of me wants to say this is a terrible thing because what else do we have a Supreme Court for but to hear cases? If the Supreme Court’s JOB is to hear and decide cases, shouldn’t it be doing it by hearing and deciding as many cases as possible? There’s certainly an attractiveness to this line of thought—but I ultimately come down on the side that a Court that hears so few cases a year is less likely to be an “activist” court and therefore, a more conservative one.
A court that doesn’t do much, almost tautologically, doesn’t have much to do. For those of us that like our whiskey and women warm, this is a great thing to see in a court. In much the same way that gridlock results in less gov’t regulation, a highly selective court simply has less opportunity to impose itself onto a (sometimes unwilling) populace. Rather than kill you with a thousand pinpricks by establishing its authority in as many places as possible, a Court is at its most conservative when it refuses to exercise its authority.
A challenge to this is that what if the legislative regime in place is what’s doing all the meddling in people’s lives—don’t we need an “active” (though not necessarily activist) court to protect the peoples’ rights? Yes and no.
“No” in the sense that there is always the remedy of the voting booth—with an inactive court, citizens are always free to resort to the political process to institute change (this option is curtailed when courts take certain issues as “constitutional” thereby removing them from the table). If the citizenry doesn’t like the legislation, they can always vote the bums out. And “yes” in the sense that an inactive court isn’t a comatose one. An inactive court still hears cases and still decides constitutional matters—but the hope is that an inactive court will only hear those cases that potentially present a CLEAR violation of a constitutional provision (none of this penumbras and emanations nonsense).
At first glance, under this approach, the New Deal court might be considered a “conservative” court in that it upheld nearly all of FDR’s legislative schemes. However, a distinction must be drawn between an “inactive/conservative” court and a “compliant” one. As the New Deal court was so much part and parcel of the New Deal itself, it was as activist as were the legislative schemes it consistently upheld.
One potential shortcoming of holding that an “inactivist” court is a conservative one is the potential for overreach. While the active court has its fingers in everyone’s pie, maybe only taking a little here and there. The inactivist court runs the risk of going whole-hog on one or two cases and attempting to pack as much Constitutional dross in one opinion as the thing can hold without bursting at the seams of its own ridiculousness.
While this is undoubtedly a concern, I think it’s ultimately mitigated by the fact that judges who could do such a thing would likely be pushing for an active court anyway. If they are unable to persuade the court to take on more cases, then it’s also unlikely they could persuade that court to let them “shoot the moon”, as it were. (I’m really going overboard with these metaphors...hehe).
A distinction should be drawn between courts at the national level (Supreme) and state courts. My concern here is more with federal courts so I will only comment briefly on state courts. On balance, I don’t have too much of a problem with a state high court hearing a lot of cases simply because the US Constitution sets the outer limits of what states can and cannot legislate over, and anything that falls within those boundaries is permissible (at least politically). This applies even where a state court rules something unconstitutional under the State Constitution. As amending a state’s constitution is a far less onerous task than is amending the US Constitution, I don’t consider it that problematic where a state court exercises that authority. At bottom, Congress could always choose to regulate in that area (assuming they have the authority) and via the Supremacy Clause—trump.
To conclude, I’ll draw a baseball analogy. The best umpires are the ones that, after the game, you barely knew they were there. The same holds true for courts.
I have a newfound respect for Alice Cooper. "If you're listening to a rock star in order to get your information on who to vote for, you're a bigger moron than they are. Why are we rock stars? Because we're morons. We sleep all day, we play music at night and very rarely do we sit around reading the Washington Journal."
Tee hee. (via The Corner)
I just finished reading Wm. Rehnquist’s The Supreme Court. I enjoyed it a lot. Rehnquist devotes more attention to the earlier eras of the Court than he does his own. In fact, none of the book covers any specifics of his tenure, which is appropriate. A good portion of the book describes Rehnquist as a young law clerk, recently hired by Justice Jackson and his early impressions and experiences at the Court. I enjoyed these passages as they give the reader something of an insight into a man that, as a 25 year old law student, I only have vague notions of—and most of those are from simply seeing his name in the opinions.
Rehnquist also covers the physical makeup of the Court from its early days stuck in the Capitol to when it finally hit the big time and received its own building. These passages were harder for me to get into simply because I had a tough time visualizing either the old or the new Court as I have seen neither. He writes about the Marshall, Taney, and Warren courts. And he writes about them well. What I especially liked was the chapter on the Taney court—Taney’s popular reputation is almost exclusively associated with his opinion in Scott v Sandford. And while that decision was lacking in sound constitutional reasoning, one can’t help but feel a twinge of regret that Taney’s reputation has come to encompass nothing but that opinion; to the detriment of his many years of excellent service as Chief Justice.
Rehnquist gives the basics of both the New Deal and Warren courts as well. I think I enjoyed the New Deal chapter a bit more (though he didn’t include much on Lochner v New York, which I’d have liked) than I did the chapter on the Warren court. I think the reason for this is in large part because the Warren court bumps up right next to his tenure on the Court so he might have felt somewhat wary of commenting.
Also, rather than discuss his term as Chief Justice, he goes into some of the structural features of the Court and how it conducts its business. This I found interesting because I am taking a Supreme Court Seminar this semester which deals almost exclusively with these issues. Rehnquist tries to dispel the charge that law clerks do all the work. He denies this and asserts that he remains free to edit the hell out of any drafts they give him and that he gives them fairly rigid instructions when it comes to writing those drafts. Do I believe him? Sure, why not. It’s not like I have a chance at being hired by the man anyway.
Perhaps my favorite bit though was when Rehnquist writes that he doesn’t spend a whole lot of time “actively” thinking about a given case. He’ll read the briefs, listen to argument, go to conference, discuss it with his clerk, and then kind of drop it from his mind. What I liked was his defense that this process works best because he has found that he has some of his more noteworthy and thoughtful insights into a case during his morning shave.
I like that.
All in all, a fine general history of the Court which is perfect for a layman or law student.
Classes start Monday, so my blogging will likely be reduced somewhat as I try to do well enough to become employed at some later date. So you may be seeing more and more cheapy roundup posts like this one*:
John Kerry, his campaign, and his surrogates have all charged that the Swift Boat Vets are nothing but a front group for the Bush campaign. Absent any actual evidence, they still call on Bush to denounce the ads.
The Bush team’s response has thus far been tepid at best. The basic White House response is that the Administration denounces ALL soft money from the 527 groups. This presumably includes the SBV ads. However, this response simply isn’t good enough. It sounds weak and like the campaign secretly likes the ads and can’t bring themselves to actively reject them. This is a losing strategy.
The reason for this is simple: Bush loses nothing by denouncing the Swift Boat Vet ad. He can only gain. Bush or Scotty M. need to get ahead of this story. Kerry has charged that this group is a front for Bush/Cheney ’04 and has called on Bush to ask them to stop running the ad. Obviously Bush has no power to do this. And both John O’Neill and Larry Thurlow have gone on record as saying that if asked to stop by the Bush team, they would refuse.
In order to insulate itself from any further charges of collusion, the Bush camp needs to say this:
“We reject ANY questioning of Senator Kerry’s service in Vietnam. We are convinced he served honorably. We also reject all ads by all of these 527 groups—including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.”Bush loses nothing by doing this. He only gains. He still sticks to the principled argument that all 527 ads are shady while drawing specific attention to the Swift Boat Vets. The Swifties are not affected by this at all and are still able to run their ads, attack Kerry, and get their message out. The Kerry camp is neutralized in charging that Bush condemn the ads and in its criticism that it’s just a Bush front group.
I just finished watching Wolf Blitzer's interview with Kerry spokeman Tad Devine on charges by Kerry that the Swift Boat Vets are a "Republican front group." I must give Wolf credit, he did not let Devine off easy and peppered him with questions.
Most telling was Wolf's repeated attempts to get Devine to concretely say whether he had ANY hard evidence that the SBV were coordinating with the Bush campaign. Devine said it was "obvious" and that all one had to do was look at "the chart" to see how clear and obvious the connections were. I'm sorry, but that chart is about as strong an indictment as a fart in a wind tunnel.
Wolf tried to pin Devine down again and asked point blank if the Kerry campaign is alleging that Rove et al. are coordinating with the SBV. Devine again referred back to the article. Wolf noted that he interviewed one of the NYT reporters earlier that day and even SHE admitted there was no actual evidence of collusion/coordination. Devine wobbled again and kept repeating the charge and when asked to provide specific names and evidence, could not do so.
Finally, Wolf asked Devine if the Kerry campaign would be filing a complaint with SEC since the connections between the Bush campaign and the SBV were so “obvious.” Devine said that the Bush team wants to burden them with lawsuits and legal filings...in other words, no, they would NOT be filing a complaint with the SEC.
In sum, Wolf did a good solid job with Devine. In my opinion Devine came off as shifty and as spinning like mad when unable to substantiate his charges of illegality.
UPDATE: The Kerry Camp has apparently filed the FEC complaint.
Clayton at Gun-Nut engages in his first fisking of a petition designed to censure the 13 Congressmen who called for UN monitoring of our presidential elections.
Ok, it's time to stategize--If I were a Swifty, how would I handle the WaPo article? Clearly they need to get ahead of the story since the media will bury most news on the topic unless it helps Kerry. So how to do that?
(1) Thurlow could choose to release his entire military file. Problem with this is that it doesn't really answer the charge that his citation also was for coming under enemy fire. So this is an option to be employed a little later. My wife said FOXNews reported that Thurlow HAD decided to release his records, but I couldn't find anything on it.
(2) Question the vailidity of his own award. Thurlow did this somewhat in the WaPo article. For credibility's sake, he needs to do more of it. This is really the key. For the attack on Thurlow's credibility rests on the implication that he thinks HIS Bronze Star is valid whereas Kerry's, for the same basic event, is not. The only real way to counter that is for Thurlow to acknowledge that his own award is undeserved as well.
That turns the story from "Records Counter Kerry Critic" to "Kerry Critic Rejects Own Award"--not only does that substantially increase Thurlow's relative credibility ("Hey, this guy is serious enough to chuck his own award"), it reflects negatively on Kerry if he does not follow suit.
That's my sense of it.
Email: cxcross -at- pacbell.net
AOL Instant Messenger: CXCross
Just a 25 year old married law student from Los Angeles.
