Abortion ruling
There’s this misnomer back in the 2004 election campaign that the American Conservative Magazine endorsed John Kerry. Indeed, google “American Conservative”, and the second link will be to the Kerry endorsement — ranked so highly because of all the liberal and Democratic bloggers who linked to it proclaiming “The American Conservative endorsed John Kerry!”
Actually the magazine did a split endorsement between Bush, Kerry, Nader, and the Constitution candidate. Pat Buchanan, the most ingrained in the Republican party and at times having been somewhere on the edge of the Republican establishment, was the natural Bush backer — even after having backed policy after policy that was anethema to him, the most obvious being the Iraq War.
Nobody, at least in bulk, bothered to link to that piece. Or the Nader piece, for that matter. We heard what we wanted to and believed what we wanted, fitting it into our agendas of backing the Democratic candidate.
But it’s difficult to see Pat Buchanan’s endorsement of Bush as anything but air tight, from the point of view of his politics. It boiled down to the courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular — and indeed Bush appointed two conservatives to the Supreme Court where Kerry would have appointed two liberals. If Kerry had followed the Clinton pattern, two old liberals. Whereas Bush appointed two young conservatives, following in the footsteps of his dad who appointed a young Clarence Thomas. (Also Justice Souter. The man Nader pointed to as the reason that the Supreme Court doesn’t matter in an election. Never mind that Souter’s existence merely served as a warning to stay away from and more carefully vet your nominees, making Nader’s “two party duoploy” of the politicized Supreme Court moot.)
Hence Bush rides out in the sunset with a 30 percent approval rating, but leaving behind a court that just ate into Roe V Wade — with two spry young Supreme Court justices who will form a core of a supreme court majority through, let’s pretend that we are in store for a 28 year interim of Democratic majority just for the sake of argument to explain how the balance has been set here. From Buchanan’s perspective, this outlasts the transitional war policies and trade policies which might be remedied at a later date — perhaps even by Democrats, whose social liberalism is balanced by the Supreme Court.
Oddly enough, Bush did consult democrats in picking a Supreme Court Justice. Harry Reid said Harriet Miers would be a good decision. But I think that might have been a clever partisan trap.