Opportunity Knocking for the GOP?
This from Chris Cillizza seems like a big stretch to me:
Given the difficulties inherent in an all out attempt to block Sotomayor, is this nomination already a lost cause for Republicans? Not by a long shot.
If the ultimate goal for Republicans is to defeat Obama in 2012, then the Sotomayor pick presents them with a golden opportunity to cast the president as a traditional liberal — far from the post-partisan figure he was able to present to the American public in the 2008 election.
This seems questionable to me. Joshua Tucker’s call for people to bring his attention to political science research on the impact of Supreme Court confirmation fights on election outcomes hasn’t come up with anything yet. Nate Silver did a quick and dirty analysis suggesting that failed SCOTUS nominees are associated with a small downturn in presidential approval, and there’s no impact of successful confirmations. And of course it’s true that if some as-yet-hidden flaw with Sotomayor emerges that’s for some reason catastrophic enough to sink her confirmation, that would reflect poorly on Obama. But Republicans taking the opportunity to point out that Obama is nominating the kind of judges who Democrats nominate, strikes me as unlikely to dramatically alter anyone’s perception of anything.
By contrast, if conservatives continue to be unable to restrain themselves from loud whining about how society unfairly tilts the odds in favor of Puerto Rican girls growing up in housing projects in the Bronx, they’ll presumably continue their current trajectory of alienating Hispanic voters.
27 Responses to “Opportunity Knocking for the GOP?”
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May 28th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Quite to the contrary, this nomination fight represents a huge risk for the GOP. If Tom Toncredo and Mitt Romney learned the hard way of the dangers of being anti-immigrant when Latinos are beoming a larger and larger voting percent of the population, I can only imagine four years will make the problem worse for the GOP’s anti-immigrant tendencies.
They either have to embrace sensible immigration policies and put away the demagoguery, or they will continue to lose. I don’t see any indication they are ready to do that. (Indeed, McCain’s loss seems to “prove” to the rightwing how foolish it is to be moderate on immigration.
I think Sotomayor shows how undisciplined and out of control the GOP really is.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:22 am
Yes, this seems like a good plan. Over and over again, polls indicate that a majority of Americans lie awake at night, worrying about the dangers of traditional liberalism. A political party that can take advantage of these fears is sure to be successful.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Yes, attacking a former prosecutor originally appointed to the bench by a Republican president would present an excellent opportunity to show Obama’s failure to live up to his promises of post-partisanship.
I can’t believe the Washington Post pays for this shit.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:37 am
Clizza represents everything that’s wrong with political reporting. Everything is hyper-meta and every situations is an opportunity for Republicans. He makes me sick.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:38 am
I could be entirely wrong, but my feeling is that most average Americans don’t really follow SCOTUS appointments with any real interest. To most people this probably seems like insider-baseball that’s not likely to affect their lives in any meaningful way. So a liberal president wants to appoint a liberal judge to the SCOTUS. So what? I’m more concerned about whether I’m going to lose my house or my job (or both).
Sure there’s certain groups that are paying close attention — Latinos certainly & various conservative culture warriors worried about abortion, immigration & the like — but to suggest that conservatives could do themselves serious political injury by too strenuously protesting Sotomayor’s appointment or that how this plays out could somehow affect Obama’s chances in 2012 is, I think, overblown.
It’s my feeling that the Sotomayor appointment just isn’t on the majority of people’s radar (there’s too many other real-life concerns for people just now) & will be even less so three years from now.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:39 am
Cillizza has no idea what he is talking about.
Here is the basic situation when it comes to Supreme Court politics. For mass consumption, the GOP basically has one good talking point: that unelected judges should not be “activists”, that they should follow the law, not make the law. People like that idea (of course it represents a gross oversimplification of what judges can and indeed must do in our legal system, but people still like the general notion).
But in detail, a solid majority favors just about every so-called “liberal” (or, if you believe the GOP, “hard left”, “extreme left”, or so on) legal position. So the last thing the GOP wants from a national political perspective is to spend a lot of time drawing contrasts between their specific legal positions and “traditional liberal” legal positions, because that would make them even less popular (at least to the extent people care about this stuff at all).
Unfortunately for the GOP’s national political aspirations, they have a bunch of very important special interest groups who care deeply about some of these specific issues, and these groups are particularly important in certain states. So the danger for the GOP is that one or more of their Senators is going to decide to blow off the GOP’s national interests and attack Sotomayor along one of these lines. Or indeed Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III of Alabama, now Ranking Member on the Judiciary Committee, may just say “f’ it”, and lead the whole opposition effort off the cliff.
In short, the GOP may avoid any serious damage if they stick to generic “she’s a liberal” or “she’s too activist” arguments and more or less leave it at that. But if they try to get into any sort of detailed argument about the exact nature of her supposed liberalism and what that says about Obama, they are very likely going to do a lot more harm to themselves than to Obama. And that is even before getting into whether they have the discipline to avoid stepping on the gender and ethnicity land mines (preliminary indications being not so good on that score).
May 28th, 2009 at 9:41 am
In a situation where there is limited downside to strenuously opposing a supreme court justice, you could make a “Black Swan” argument– just because failed SCOTUS nominees haven’t resulted in an overall harm to a president’s popularity before, doesn’t mean that it won’t happen now. And you won’t know until you try.
In this case, however, Republicans would be setting themselves up for a major fail in opposing Sotomayor’s nomination, as she’s pretty much unassailable as a nominee, so the risks are too large. But in general, I can see how a case could be made that opposition is a worthwhile strategy, because there’s a 99.9% chance of nothing lost and maybe a 0.1% chance of a big win.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:52 am
the Sotomayor pick presents them with a golden opportunity to cast the president as a traditional liberal
Why? It’s not like she’s the second coming of Brennan or something. (The Dem base may have hoped for that, but we’re clearly not getting it.)
The Republican party is the boy who cried “liberal extremist”. They tried to describe *Obama* that way. Nobody is going to believe it coming from them. Actual legal scholars describe Sotomayor as a moderate because she is one, and her record backs that up.
Republican talking heads saying she’s the most extreme liberal since the last person they identified as the most extreme liberal in the history of liberal extremism aren’t going to convince anyone, because it’s the only song they know and everyone else is sick of it. Describing moderates as left-wing extremists undermines their *own* credibility by revealing their lack of perspective.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Not to mention if they continue to suggest a sitting appeals court justice doesn’t know how to put the law ahead of her “feelings,” they will continue to bleed women.
It turns out the ladies don’t love suggestions that a respected jurist has to prove she’s not hysterical and irrational.
May 28th, 2009 at 9:55 am
a golden opportunity to cast the president as a traditional liberal
Which, since they were just calling him a “socialist,” means that they feel that the nomination of Sotomayor shows that Obama is moderating.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:04 am
I want to be his bookie.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Racist blah, affirmative action appointment blah, legislate from the blah.
Get me! I’m a conservative!
May 28th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I think the GOP should put all their eggs in this basket, since it will pay off richly, just like their attacks on Bill Ayers awakened American resentment at late 1960s leftist radicalism and the GOP swept the vote.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:08 am
Get me! I’m a conservative!
I am curious what the going rates are for an ability to mouth conservative talking points. I already have a job, but I would consider moonlighting if the price were right. And the work doesn’t seem that hard.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:10 am
Cilliza is one of the worst people at the washington post. Which is sadly getting less readable by the day. Anyone who refers to themselves as “the fix” does not deserve to be read. In addition he is proud that his work contains no actual policy discussion and is only concerned with process, the “game” and media cycles. The whole blog is what is wrong with the mainstream media distilled down to the most worthless drivel imaginable.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:11 am
Don’t overuse that last line, Matt. You were on fire yesterday, and while endless repetition of “empathy” and “eats pig bits” will be the GOP, you want to keep it fresh for when you use it on cabloid TV.
People like that idea (of course it represents a gross oversimplification of what judges can and indeed must do in our legal system, but people still like the general notion).
But people also know the basic historical narrative of Dred Scott, separate-but-equal, and so on. There’s a Whig ameliorist history of SCOTUS: they make decisions that look fucked up in retrospect, after the decisions have been fixed. I’m certainly not denying your point, because I think you’re right, but there’s also the contradictory impulse, which is that “making law” (in the Brown sense) is often fine in hindsight. Unless you’re a Dixie revanchist.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Tell me again why we’re supposed to care that newspapers are disappearing?
May 28th, 2009 at 10:30 am
My reading of Cilliza is that he was saying her certain confirmation – and forthcoming extreme liberal activism from the bench – is what will blow back on Obama in the next election.
Hard to imagine. Most people will pay little attention to the actual rulings (unless of course SCOTUS overturns settled law i.e., Roe v Wade).
May 28th, 2009 at 10:35 am
Surprisingly Ed Rollins commentary on CNN on the nomination is quite good or at least sane.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/28/rollins.sotomayor/index.html
Of course what they should do and what the will are streets that don’t necessarily cross each other.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:36 am
I’m certainly not denying your point, because I think you’re right, but there’s also the contradictory impulse, which is that “making law” (in the Brown sense) is often fine in hindsight. Unless you’re a Dixie revanchist.
Oh sure. In fact, I would get right to the most contentious example, and point out that a large majority of people agree with Roe v. Wade, don’t want to see it overturned, and don’t want to see another Supreme Court Justice who would vote to overturn it.
So to put my prior point in more specific terms, the GOP is basically talking in code to its pro-life special interest groups (and some similar overlapping groups) with this rhetoric. The general public likes the sound of what the GOP is saying, but they wouldn’t like the actual decoded message–which, of course, is why the GOP is talking in code.
So in light of their national interests, the GOP very much wants to keep this discussion encoded, because if they talk in plain terms about these issues they are going to get hammered by the general public. But if you ever kick around the conversations those special interest groups have among themselves, they are getting very impatient with this dynamic. So we shall see if it holds up this time.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:40 am
Surprisingly Ed Rollins commentary on CNN on the nomination is quite good or at least sane.
Rollins is a staunch partisan, of course, but his political instincts are sometimes pretty good. Anyway, I think he is sincerely trying to warn the GOP away from doing some self-destructive.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:43 am
The lorem ipsum of conservative rhetoric is sufficiently simple for a bot to repeat. Hence: Al.
May 28th, 2009 at 10:47 am
Tell me again why we’re supposed to care that newspapers are disappearing?
Because newspapers do other things besides serve as platforms for vastly overpaid op-ed columnists. I have to say, though, that I’m astounded that op-ed columnists in general haven’t even attempted to step up their intellectual game in the face of increased competition from political blogs–I mean, you’ve really gotta try to write something as inane as the Cilizza piece under discussion here.
May 28th, 2009 at 11:19 am
I think this is a golden opportunity for Republicans to demonstrate their fealty to a shrinking base of mainly-Southern white males who resent the advances our society has made in the areas of racial and gender equality.
This is a golden opportunity for them to play the “Real American” card that worked so well for McCain/Palin in 2008, and for George Allen in 2006, and I strongly doubt they’ll let that opportunity pass them by.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
If Obama had picked a white male with the exact same resume and judicial opus as Sotomayor, Cillizza would not be calling this a golden opportunity for Republicans. And that’s pretty disgusting if you think about it for a minute.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Oh, you mean like the NYT uncritically recycling Rosen’s Sotomayor smears in a NEWS story, not an op-ed? Yeah, we’ll
really miss that kind of thing too. Sure.
May 28th, 2009 at 12:56 pm
I think you and Nate should be careful with these statistics. It’s not clear the choice of nominee (and the intensity of opposition) is exogenous with respect to approval rating. If there is any kind of persistence in these ratings the inference is not valid.