This Shit Is Really Important

It's great fun to slag on the fact-free media and slag on the small sliver of Iowans that will actually participate tonight and slag on this crazy process that has taken over how we select the next President. It values personality over policy, money over ideas, media favorability over issue favorability.

But it's important to step back and understand just how crucial this choice actually is.

Democrats will start 2009 having lost a full branch of government for a generation. We may hope that George Bush's departure from the stage will result in him being erased out of history like wiping clean a chalkboard, but his legacy will resonate for decades.

After nearly seven years in the White House, President Bush has named 294 judges to the federal courts, giving Republican appointees a solid majority of the seats, including a 60%-to-40% edge over Democrats on the influential U.S. appeals courts.

The rightward shift on the federal bench is likely to prove a lasting legacy of the Bush presidency, since many of these judges -- including his two Supreme Court appointees -- may serve for two more decades.

And despite the Republicans' loss of control of the Senate, 40 of Bush's judges won confirmation this year, more than in the previous three years when Republicans held the majority.

We all know that Republicans bottled up a lot of Clinton judicial nominees in committee, and Pat Leahy has not really done the same. But even if he did, we're talking about 20 of the last 28 years with conservative judges being put up for confirmation. You can fault this Senate for confirming too many Bush nominees, and to an extent they have, but it's just a fact of life that elections have consequences, and the federal bench may be the most wide-reaching consequence.

There are appeals courts out there which will be sharply conservative for a long time to come. These hopes of public financing of elections, rolling back the unitary executive, ending the surveillance state and official secrecy, and on and on, are going to run into a stone wall with this kind of court. And that's not just the Supremes, where Roe v. Wade hangs by a thread. It's the appeals courts and the US district courts, which are packed with Federalist Society-approved jurists for some time to come.

We can't afford another term's worth of those appointments. They fly largely under the radar except for a couple high-profile fights, and they're not typically something you can base a campaign on (though the Supreme Court is different, and you can make that an issue). But make no mistake, the conservative movement knows exactly how important this is.

Conservatives tend to agree on that point. They say the ideological makeup of the courts has grown into a major issue on the right, and it has brought Republicans together, whether they are social conservatives, economic conservatives or small-government libertarians.

"This issue unites the base," said Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, a group that lobbies for Bush's judicial nominees. "It serves as a stand-in for the culture wars: religion, abortion, gay marriage and the coddling of criminals." [...]

While Republicans find themselves somewhat divided heading into the election year, Bush is widely praised for his record of pressing for conservative judges.

"From Day One, President Bush made the judiciary a top priority, and he fought very hard for his nominees," said Washington attorney Bradford Berenson, who worked in the White House counsel's office in Bush's first term. "He was less willing to compromise than President Clinton. As a result, in raw numbers, he may end with somewhat fewer judges than Clinton had."

Bill Clinton let Orrin Hatch pick a lot of his judges. George Bush went for broke. As a result, there are hundreds of movement conservatives placed around the country as long-term thorns in the side of progressive governance. It's the right of the President to have those selections. The next one MUST reverse this trend.