Lighten Up

I was in the office yesterday, the day before a long weekend. For the life of me I could not quite figure out why. No one else appeared to be going to work. The commute was a breeze, and the garage had plenty of parking spaces.

Only Andy was in. Mike the Lobbyist was working something up on the Hill, and was going to cut out early to meet a contractor who was going to double the size of his house.

He told me last week he had done the calculus. Adding two stories to his little house in Alexandria would more than double his investment. Though he would lose his kitchen, he said he could live in a bedroom in the front and the contractors could seal off the rest of the place with plastic sheeting. He could put one of those white Portable On Demand Storage units in his driveway, and all the furniture he didn’t need could go there while the construction went on.

I shuddered. Relying on the contractors to finish before the winter came was a crap shoot. No kitchen until Christmas? Moving is bad enough. Living through construction sounded awful.

I had been out of the office all week. Catching up on business, and trying to figure out the implications of the Executive Order that was issued the day before had me glued to the computer screen. There were something like a hundred messages to get to before I could start anything new, but the world changed around 10:30 when Andy stuck his head in my office door and said that Sandra Day O’Connor had resigned from the Supreme Court.

“Shoot,” I said. “I thought it was going to be Rhenquist. I didn’t think he would make it to the end of the term.”

“He is a cagey old coot. I don’t know what he is going to do.” I was careful, since Andy will talk your ear off with any excuse. He is a Yale man, a football player, and a retired Marine. He may be a capitalist now, but he is actually a philosophical practitioner of the art of war, and he had already talked to me for a half hour on the subject of the impact of The Basic School on the commitment of pilots to provide Close Air Support to forces in the field.

I’m as interested in that as anyone, particularly with the situation in eastern Afghanistan . The Taliban had bagged a Chinook helicopter that seemed to have been taking a Special Operations team out to the hills to hunt bad guys. There may have been a team in place already, and there was some uncertainty about their whereabouts and safety. It was not good news, and I did not believe what I heard.

Steve Canyon had talked to one of the young SEALS who had come back from the hills a couple months ago. The young man said that Afghanistan was special operations heaven. The Americans were growing beards and wearing Afghan clothing and learning verses of the Qu’ran to shout as they fought.

It sounded just like something out of Kipling’s Great Game, but it was unsettling to think of what was happening out there in the hills, and how long we would have the will to send the helicopters and the young men out there.

These days, of course, I am much more suited to the sort of warfare that is already starting about Justice O’Connor’s seat on the High Court.

Justice O’Connor was seated with famed Redskin running back John Riggens years ago. Riggo was drunk, of course, and the conversation bored him. He leaned over and told her to “Lighten up, Sandy Baby.” Then he slipped below the table to rest for a while.

It has been eleven years since there was a vacancy, and people have been preparing for this battle ever since. The O’Connor resignation was not the likely option, not since the Chief Justice developed cancer. He is 85 years old, to boot, so the strategists were preparing the battlefield for that fight. No one was figuring that the health that mattered was that of Justice O’Connor’s husband, who apparently is declining with Alzheimer’s.

Sandra is going retiring to spend more time with her family, and that may be the first time that phrase has been true in Washington in a long time.

I vaguely recalled the fights over Ruth Bader Ginsberg and David Souter, the last two associates confirmed to the court. I have had a chance to see both of them up close, when they visited us at the War College . Souter lives over in the little sliver of the Southwest District when the court is in session, and he used to jog at Fort McNair where it was safe. He got mugged not too long ago, since the gentrification of the area is not complete. He wasn’t hurt, and the District cops had fun with the assailants when they rounded them up and told them exactly who they had robbed.

Justice Ginsberg was extended a complementary membership to the Army-Navy Country Club, as all the justices are, but I have never seen her on the links.

This is going to be entertaining. The assumption is that George W. will get at least two and maybe more nominations through the rest of his second term. The litmus test of Roe-vs-Wade hangs at 6-3 right now, and the hysteria is that the President’s appointments will shift the balance of the judicial philosophy back to the Neolithic age.

It is not a bad fear to have, all things considered. But the high bench seems to have an intoxicating effect on people, and how the justices act once they get there is not always possible to predict. Particularly not since the word “bork” entered the language as a verb.

President Reagan nominated Robert Bork, a man with a distinguished, if conservative, published record of accomplishment. The large body of work is what got him in trouble with the waiting Democrats. Ever since, it has been considered a plus in a nominee’s resume to have a record of ambiguity.

Clarence Thomas was nominated on the Pin Point strategy, which was to slide by his conservative record and emphasize the poverty of his beginnings, and the credibility of his skin to make him sympathetic. Neither he nor Anita Hill ever quite recovered from what Justice Thomas described as “a high-tech lynching,” though he got the job and has been voting with jolly acerbic Antonin Scalia ever since.

Souter and Ginsberg have been center and left of center, pivot points for the other wings of the bench. I am not sophisticated enough to nuance the quality of their opinions, but I have not heard that they are threatening the stature of Oliver Wendell Holmes. There the matter has rested for over a decade.

Now the court is poised for a real change of direction, and with a third of the divided powers of government up for grabs, this fight will be for a lot of marbles.

The best strategy might be to follow the Riggens principle. Lighten up and nominate the best and most distinguished jurist possible.

But I don’t think that can happen. The Administration will comb the ranks for a candidate whose composition includes the right mix of conservatism and cachet. There is talk that the current Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, might be just the right man for the job.

But that conventional wisdom was with the expectation that it would be Chief Justice Rhenquist who was going to go first.

The bottle rockets are already flying, but the President says he is going to think about some candidates over the long weekend. As if Karl Rove had not had a file ready for this moment since he joined the first Bush campaign.

It is going to be great theater in the Senate. Given the perceived importance of the appointment, we may see the nuclear option exercised by Dr. Frist. He has stated often his intent to change the rules on judicial confirmation to that of a simple majority. This fight is what all the other scuffling has been about.

And now the time has come.

I suspect we may actually get to see the consequences of an exchange of constitutional weapons of mass destruction.

I wonder what nuclear winter will be like in the Senate? Will anyone have the energy for the next fight? This is way too serious for the nonsense we are going to see. The President ought to lighten up a little and find a decent judge with a good heart.

Even if it won’t matter, it would be worth a try.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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