Reply #36: See post 28... [View All]

[Sir Jeffrey]

and, in addition to the frantic ravings of the republican party base, think about this for a bit:

You are Bush (just for a few moments in this hypothetical, thank god). You are at the lowest point of your political career, probably your life. Your poll numbers are in the toilet. Iraq is a clusterfuck. Katrina unmasked the inept nature of your entire crony govt. Social Security Reform/privatization is DOA. Your entire agenda has been temporarily ( I hope permanently) derailed. Your friends are either indicted, getting ready to be indicted, or unindicted co-conspirators in <name your scandal here>.

Then, poof. You've got the single best chance of anyone in your party's "glorious" history to shore up your base and rally every died in the wool right wing conservative to your side under the banner of overturning Roe. All you need to do is nominate a firebrand, true blue conservative to get the debate off of your criminal friends, Iraq, etc. Your poll numbers would shoot up ten points or so and the debate would be all about Roe for the next year or so...just in time to sweep into the mid-terms.

But, instead of that, you cave in to the Senate Minority Leader. Your party rebels against you en masse. You are openly ridiculed by those who were kool-aid drinkers as of two days ago. You just pissed off the largest subset of your base, also known as the only people in the electorate who still give two shits about you. You have just sealed the fate of the Republican Party for the next election, since abortion has effectively been marginalized as a wedge issue. If nobody trusts republicans to follow through on their signature issues (Disaster response, fiscal responsibility and ending abortion), they won't win.

My point? Bush would be shouting from the rooftops were Miers set on overturning Roe. There would be no need to be secretive about it. COnfirmation will happen even if every Dem Senator opposes (which won't happen).

Before you say "filibuster", know that Frist would go nuclear given the opportunity on abortion...the political payoff for him would be too much to pass up. He was set on going nuclear over some federal nominees a few months ago.

One more point: I liken abortion to Pavlov's experiments. Ring the bell, vote for me. It has worked for decades. You don't create a political problem like this to solve it. You create it to exist in perpetuity...fighting the good fight, if you will. Once abortion is "fixed", there is nothing so divisive that exists in politics that will continue to keep otherwise decent people from voting in their own interests. And the debate has been so wonderfully framed for the republicans that they have it down to whether you support baby-killing or not (which is absurd, but rational thought doesn't enter into it). I have lived all over the South, and I can't tell you how many people I know/met who vote solely on anti-abortion. I am sure you know many like that too.