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Let's go back to October 2005, when then President Bush 43 came to a bi-partisan agreement with the two senators in leadership of the judiciary committee, Arlen Spector and Patrick Leahy, and nominated White House Counsel Harriett Miers to fill the seat vacated by the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Conner. A lot of conservatives panned the nomination, considering Miers intellectually weak, not conservative enough, with a thin resume, and a crony pick as she was a close friend and confidant of the President.
From the standpoint of Minority Leader Harry Reid and Judiciary committee ranking member Leahy, this nominee was as good as the democrats could have hoped to have gotten from a GOP White House with a GOP senate majority. However, because Harry Reid and his band of democrat radicals- many of whom are still in the senate including current majority leader Chuck Schumer- couldn't resist their inner urges to oppose anything a republican president suggested, democrats stood in unison from the outset of the process- at the behest of their leadership- in opposition to the nominee.
Miers began the interview process, which was an unmitigated disaster for her, as conservatives in the senate turned on her and were unimpressed by her thin judicial record. The noise became so great that the tide turned against her on the right and she withdrew from the nomination 3 weeks later.
Bush then retrenched, listened to conservatives, and nominated Samuel Alito. The rest is history. Alito united conservatives, overcame a filibuster attempt, winning 4 democrat votes in the process, and was confirmed to the court. Alito has been a conservative stalwart on the court ever since, especially as it pertains to right to life and free speech, but he owes his seat to the ineptitude and failed leadership of Harry Reid, who didn't take the win and played hard line politics.
Fast forward 8 years to November 2013, when Reid, again playing partisan politics against the GOP and Mitch McConnell, invoked the nuclear option and changed the cloture rules of 60 votes to advance a nomination to a simple majority, in order to advance Obama's radical judicial nominations. Of course, invoking the nuclear option let the proverbial cat out of the bag, and McConnell invoked it again in 2017, this time extending the new cloture rule to Supreme Court nominations, which led to President Trump's 3 Supreme Court appointments being confirmed.
Twice Harry Reid played partisan political games for short term gain while sacrificing long term strategy, and twice it bit him in the rear end, with the lifetime appointments of 4 conservative Supreme Court Justices, all of whom still sit on the court. To me this is Reid's legacy, not his many big government nanny state victories like the Shovel Ready Stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd- Frank, it is the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
So what lesson can we learn from Harry Reid's miscues? If you are a congressional republican, apparently none. Just like with Harry Reid, house republicans let the perfect be the enemy of good when they removed Kevin McCarthy last October, leading to the trainwreck of Mike Johnson's speakership, neutering their majority, and giving Biden a lifeline.
Going back another 3- 7 years, the RINOs' and GOP establishment's failure to support President Trump both legislatively and legally gave us the worst Presidency in my adult lifetime, and yes that includes Jimmy Carter, in Joe Biden. Biden's presidency is threatening to inflict long term damage on our republic in every single way, from lawfare, to fiscal policy, social policy, our broken education system, and foreign policy- all while dramatically increasing the size, scope, reach, and cost of government. Biden has been an absolute failure in every aspect.
So are we, the voters of this nation, willing to learn the lessons our so-called "leaders" refuse to learn, that frivolous short-term gain often comes at a cost of long-term pain? That selfish interests divide and harm us rather than unite and lift us? Will we demand that they represent OUR interests, not the interests of the monied and connected? And that the profits of pettiness come at the cost of legacy? We have to ask that of ALL politicians, not just the ones we don't like, all of them, and then hold them accountable. When we are finally able to inculcate that into our body politic, our republic will recover.
Calvin Coolidge warned us when he famously said, "Unless the people, through unified action, arise and take charge of their government, they will find that their government has taken charge of them. Independence and liberty will be gone, and the general public will find itself in a condition of servitude to an aggregation of organized and selfish interest." Amen.
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