No one knows who they are, really.
We all love conservatives. They want to conserve things. My mother used to preserve things, like jelly. I liked that. Plenty of sugar. Same thing, right, conserving and preserving. My recipe book talks about cooking up a chicken and reserving the juice to make gravy or soup stock. Then we can serve it.
And eat it.
Conserving, preserving, reserving, and serving, and eating it.
To reserve means to save, as do all the rest.
I think we're getting somewhere.
Somewhere, but where, I know not.
The chairman of the Republican Party, Ken Mehlman, apologized for the despicable way the GOP treated blacks during the Civil Rights revolution, when it was against. Nixon ran against blacks. No busing, no integration, no nothin' for blacks. Except more nightsticks and more police.
"I am here to tell you as the Republican chairman we were wrong," Mehlman said. Other Repubs are either laughing up their sleeves or rolling in their graves. After all, Nixon won, didn't he, and that's all that counts in politics, isn't it?
Well, halleluyah, Ken!
It's a good thing the blacks decided not to wait. See Martin Luther King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" telling his go-slow fellow ministers to put their go-slow advice in their pipes and smoke it.
In those days, liberals were FOR doing anything that had the conceivable purpose of promoting the aspirations of their fellow man, blacks. Conservatives were the ones the demonstrators and marchers were protesting against. Those German Shepard dogs and fire-hoses of Bull Connor were not liberal firehoses and dogs. They were conservative.
But the people today say they want conservative, so we'll have to see that the get it, won't we.
Which flavor of conservative would you like?
David Davenport of the Hoover Institute who teaches public policy at Pepperdine University has a column in the San Francisco Chronicle today in which he says that it's not good enough for Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), a member of the Judiciary Committee, where Supreme Court justices are hatched, to say that Pres. Bush is going to appoint a conservative.
Alberto Gonzales, the president's buddy, is a conservative, but the wrong kind. In the religion that is the Republican Party, Gonzales is a heretic. The far right is the Orthodox. Beards and skullcaps. Gonzales is Reform. They can't stand that.
Davenport notes that there are so many conservatives that you have to slap labels on 'em to keep 'em straight: social conservatives, economic conservatives, neoconservatives (liberals who've been mugged, according to the classic definition), and traditional conservatives, rich fat bastards hollerin' 'pull up the ladder, Jack, I've got mine.' Sometimes they earn it and sometimes they inherit it, but either way, they forget where they, or grandpa, came from. Those Mayflower yokels were the scum of the earth where they came from. Run out of two countries, England AND Holland, the most tolerant country in the world. They came over here to set up their own tyranny. Today their descendants idolize them. We draw pictures of the Pilgrims on Thanksgiving. They were the Taliban of their day. Ask Anne Hutchinson and Roger William. They got run out. But that's another story for another day.
Davenport points to a conservative as his model of the next great Supreme Court justice if only he could get the nod. This would be the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals judge in Schiavo who refused to allow the Congress to establish a separate court for this one case. His name is Stanley Birch. He was conserving the plan of the Constitution according to the Framers.
Davenport seems to like conservatives who will do that. I don't know where we'd be if we really kept to the plan of the Framers. They framed in slavery and the slave trade, two different aspects of a bigger problem, treating other people like dirt. I wish that I didn't suspect conservatives of being inclined to tolerate treating other people like dirt a bit more than I'm inclined to do myself.
Yale Law professor Paul Gewirtz, noted in a recent Linda Greenhouse column in the NYT, says that there are two different type of Supreme Court justice (or nominee).
The first kind, the one you want to watch out for and run, fleeing, for the hills if you see 'em coming, is the person who sees himself as a critic of the Court, as in "The Court has been getting it all wrong for decades." This guy'll reinstitute Jim Crow if you don't watch out. They're not going to change for the better when they get on the Court. They'll be the anchors, screaming for the bad old days, but calling them good.
Davenport lists Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Robert Bork, whose last name is now a verb, as to to get Borked, as the leading examples.
The second kind, the one all true Americans know and love, is the kind "who feel themselves connected to the basic trajectory of American law [and who will] remain open to observing changes in society." These seem to be two different things: those who identify with the basic trajectory of legal progress and those open to change in the right direction, forward, onward-and-upward, not backwards.
The first kind are the reactionary conservatives.
The second kind are the progressive conservatives, like those much-hated Republican appointees:
Earl Warren (Brown v. Board, school integration) and (one man one vote)
Harry Blackmun (Roe v. Wade, the constitutional right to abortion)
Anthony M. Kennedy (Lawrence v. Texas, privacy, justice, and equal rights for all people, even if they are gay)
These are republican liberals. Conservatives, really, but sufficiently conservative that they are conserving underlying values that are more important than conserving discrimination because it has been around so long we're used to it and think it good because it is. That's how many of us grow up thinking, isn't it? If slavery exists, it must be good because even the ministers and presidents all own slaves. In the beginning, they did, of course.
Nuthin' wrong with Jim Crow because on Sunday morning all the churches are segregated, except for Glide Memorial in San Francisco, of course.
Terry Eastland, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard, quoted by Greenhouse, says "The impression many conservatives have is that Gonzalez (Alberto R.) is conventional in his legal thinking and unlikely to repair to first principles were he on the court." Eastland is speaking for "first principle" shellback, hard-core conservative Republicans, the people who used to own the country, and ran it like the plantation it was, complete with slaves (black) and serfs (white, non-union labor, men, women, and children).
I would like to know which first principles Eastland would like to see the Nation return to: slavery? the slave trade? Jim Crow? Anti-labor? No voting for the propertyless and women? Those are our first principles. Our first principle in America is: screw your buddy. It was in the Constitution. Equal rights didn't make it in until after the Civil War. Fourteenth Amendment, 1868. We're still fighting over the meaning of equality. That's why the conservatives hate Anthony Kennedy. He told 'em what it meant. It means that people have to be treated fairly and that includes the people you don't feel like having over for dinner. If you're straight that may mean gays, or minorities, or anyone else who doesn't meet the Ozzie and Harriet standard.
Well, now that I've figured out what a conservative is, I'm glad I ain't one.
And one last thing. When it comes to interpreting the Constitution, Justice Breyer is a "Basic Values" kinda guy. He looks at the words and to figure out what they mean, asks, "What values are they meant to serve? Values change over time. Value #1 is to set up, run, and preserve the country. The Framers had to cave in on slavery to get to first base. Value #2 is equality. Why #2? Because without #1, you don't get to #2. #1 is the price paid for #2. But now we're headed for third base. Equality for other folks than plain vanilla and chocolate.
Now we're getting down to where things really get sticky, boys and girls, boys and boys, and girls and girls. You can see why this Constitutional Law business is a bit dicey.
Justices Scalia and Thomas, and wannabe Bork, however, see things differently. For them it's their way or the highway. It's gotta be the way the Framers said it meant. None of this evolving constitution nonsense for Ol' Scalia; evolution makes him puke, and there's Ol' Thomas, puking right along with him.
Put me down as a Basic Values, American Trajectory guy; Column A on the Con-Law Menu.
Column B is for the current Pukesters.
"Current" because I'm always concerned about the worm turning.
Show me the American Way, the American Trajectory, Our Basic Values, the Democracy we're willing to send our kids in harm's way for.
That's the kinda guy I wanna be.
No one wants to die for the property and civil rights of 1787 any more.
We're too far down the road, and thank God for that.
Ooops!
