Roberts Nomination Strategery At Work - Road to the Middle Class

THE FIRST REACTIONS to the nomination of Judge John G. Roberts to the U.S. Supreme Court indicate that the Bush Administration has thought long and hard about court nominations. Roberts is young, brilliant, boringly straight arrow, and has only been on the bench for a year and a half. Thus Charles Hurt forecasts an easy nomination process, and John Podhoretz evaluates him as suitably boring. As the nomination process starts let us conduct a quick tour d´horizon.

Grand Strategy We want liberals to abandon their living constitution doctrine. They have developed this doctrine over the last half century because they have come to rely on the Supreme Court to rule in favor of their educated elite agenda. We want to change their minds. We want them to see the constitution as a bulwark against the evil right-wing agenda. They will start to change their minds when a conservative court starts goring their oxen. Putting a conservative on the court hastens the day when they will opportunistically discover the virtues of a “dead” constitution over a living one.

Strategy We want a court that has a smaller appetite for power, that does not seek, like the Massachusetts High Court, to be out there on the cutting edge of societal evolution. In that sense Roberts appears to be a good choice. He appears to be a work horse, not a show horse.

Tactics In the past few years as Microsoft has begun to focus above all on the issue of security they have come to appreciate, like the military, the advantage of a small target. A small target is more difficult to destroy. So they have begun to work to make Windows smaller, with fewer entrances and exits. The Bushies have applied this understanding in the Roberts nomination. Roberts has spent most of his life litigating, so he doesn´t have a long paper trail. Also, he appears to be a mild-mannered man without enemies. Writes Podhoretz:

Roberts has, by all accounts, an astonishingly mild demeanor. He´s a churchgoing father of adopted children, personally well-liked on all sides of the political spectrum — evidently because he hasn´t given anybody a reason to dislike him personally.

Notice too that if this mild-mannered man gets confirmed without a big fight it cools down the whole judicial nomination furnace. It will be harder for the liberal activists to blow their supporters up into white heat for the next nomination.

No doubt Ralph Neas of the (liberal) People for the American Way and Nan Aron of the (liberal) Alliance for Justice will deploy every argument they can against Roberts. But, as of today, it looks like they have an uphill fight ahead of them.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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