My first diary entry, from a post I made in the open thread.
If I might be permitted a William Safire-like flight of fancy, lately I have begun to wonder if Bush didn't cut some kind of deal with one or more Supreme Court justices (the most likely suspect being Sandra Day O'Connor) so they wouldn't retire during his first term, thereby sparing him the political dilemma of trying to fill a high court vacancy.
Strange as it may sound, I think a significant portion of the Republican leadership worries about packing the SCOTUS with too many right wing ideologues. If a court full of Scalia clones were to seriously start overturning Warren and Burger-era precedents like
Bakke or
Miranda or
Roe v. Wade, it would cost the GOP a lot of votes among moderates and independents, more than they could make up for with their base.
In other words, Bush can get a lot of mileage out of promising to put Torquemada on the court, as long as he doesn't actually deliver on it. But now that his party controls the Senate, he would have to make good on his promises, otherwise the Moral Majority types will turn on him just like they did with his father. Better to wait until after the election, when he can appoint whoever he wants, and not have to worry about facing the voters again.
I wonder, too, if Poppy didn't actually know what he was doing when he appointed David Souter. The lack of a paper trail cuts both ways, you know. I could imagine him saying to John Sununu "find me somebody who's a moderate but doesn't have much of a record, so the right wing will back him". Then when the guy turns out not to be Torquemada after all, they throw up their hands and say "we had no idea".
Just a thought...