A front page article in today’s Washington Post indicates that, as of now, the Democrats “will not launch a major fight to block the Supreme Court nomination of John G. Roberts Jr.” According to a Senate Democratic aide, “No one’s planning all-out warfare.”
Democrats said that instead of mounting a headlong assault on Roberts, they plan to use the hearings and the surrounding attention by the news media to remind voters of their party’s values, including the protection of rights for individual Americans. The plan calls for emphasizing rights beyond abortion in an effort to appeal to a broader swath of the electorate.
I think this is a splendid idea. Since Roberts’s opposition to racial quotas in hiring and college admissions and to racial busing of school children has been featured so prominently in Democratic criticism of his record, his nomination hearings provide an ideal forum to focus attention on the views of both Democrats and Republicans on the rights of “individual Americans.”
I, for one, would love to hear Democrats explain whether they believe all “individual Americans” have a right to be free from discrimination based on race or ethnicity, or only some Americans. If they believe that right belongs to all Americans, then I would like to hear them explain why they believe that distributing benefits and burdens based on race, i.e., racial preferences, does not violate that right.Maybe then they could explain why their colleagues in the Michigan Democratic Party are so opposed to allowing the citizens of Michigan to vote on whether they believe such a right should be included in the Michigan Constitution.
Democrats have also complained about Roberts’s opposition to the redefinition of voting rights from the right to be free from race-based barriers to voting to the redefined right to have districts gerrymandered in such a manner as to enable minorities to elect “representatives of their choice.” Thus perhaps, in outlining “their party’s values,” they could explain whether they believe that the voting rights of, say, Hispanics in black districts, blacks in Hispanic districts, Haitians in a Cuban district, Democrats in a Republican district, etc., etc., are being violated because those groups are denied the opportunity to elect representatives of their choice.
Voting rights is an ideal topic for this elucidation of party values since it would also give Republicans the opportunity to explain their historical and continuing complicity in violating the “without regard” priniciple, a principle they otherwise support from time to time, when it’s convenient.
