Miers out - Scalia-Lite in

Wow, you go out of town for a few days and the Bush administration starts imploding, maybe I should go out of town more often.

The good news of the week, obviously the indictment of Scooter Libby and the possibility that there will be more to come. The bad news, it would seem, is actually the withdrawal of Miers nomination. Instead of getting a relative unknown, we are handed an absolute conservative.

The supreme court position, which a judge can hold for life, is to fill the vacancy left by Sandra Day O'Connor, a swing voter, and could shift the bench to the right for decades to come.

Mr Alito was Mr Bush's favorite for the position before he decided to nominate someone outside what he calls the "judicial monastery," White House officials told the Associated Press.

Mr Alito has been called "Scalito" or "Scalia-lite" by some lawyers because his judicial philosophy invites comparisons to supreme court justice Antonin Scalia, the leading conservative on the bench. -The Guardian

We can be sure that the nomination of such a radical conservative will break off any chance of avoiding a filibuster on the nomination. Although the republicans were able to use the threat of the "nuclear option" last time to paint the "liberal" democrats as being partisan and holding up the work of the government, bringing about a compromise, the public is not on their side this time. With the miserable response to Katrina, the indictment of DeLay, the investigation of Frist, the investigation of Rove, the indictment of Cheney's Chief of Staff, and the withdrawal of Miers nomination, the public perception of the Republican party has shifted dramatically. A Supreme Court showdown will only bolster the Democratic party for the 2006 midterm elections. So maybe, it's not such a bad thing after all.

On another, completely random tangent, I have to take a moment to talk about the abortion issue, since it seems to be all that the media is focused on when considering supreme court nominees. The Republican party is supposed to be all about a small central government and giving the states the right to chose. Also, a party that is so adamant about guns being a right that the government should not interfere with, citing privacy concerns, why is the right to chose something the government should be involved in? Or is it simply because it's deemed a woman's issue?

Which is another complete irony, because the last time I checked, women can't impregnate themselves. Yet, as always in our society, the blame and the burden is rested squarely on the shoulders of women. If the goal was really to lessen or end the amount of abortions, then more effort should be focused on prevention. Plan B, emergency contraception, teaching children about more than abstinence and making oral contraceptives more easily available instead of allowing pharmacists the option of not filling the prescription and insurance companies the option of not covering them, would all lessen the number of abortions. Instead, we have Medicare and insurance companies required to cover viagra (but not contraception), abstinence only education that has actually increased the number of kids having unprotected sex (with a huge jump in reported oral an anal sex), and violence against women spiraling out of control with the number of rapes increasing 5% in the last five years alone.

Obviously, what we've been doing has not been working, so why would we go even further in the same direction? Or is it that the abortion issue isn't really about abortion at all, but rather about the role of women in society. And I can hardly accept it as solely a moral issue when most of the groups fighting abortion on moral grounds also advocate the death penalty and fail to recognize war as murder as well. Women have come to far to have our role in society or our right to make decisions about our own bodies decided by a bunch of old white men.

posted by Sarai @ 1:35 PM