CAN BUSH CONTINUE TO SHAPE THE DIRECTION OF THE FEDERAL JUDICIARY?

Right wingers can't seem to come to grips that there are consequences for bad behavior. They want Libby pardoned; they want Paris Hilton to serve her time at her party house with the stripper pole in the living room; they want to occupation of Iraq to escalate into a World War... and now they can't believe that the day has ended when George Bush and the Federalist Society could install any worthless Big Business hack into the federal judiciary who they want to. Today' Washington Post says rightists are "worried" and they seem to be blaming the Bush Regime's preoccupation with all sorts of distractions and their inattentiveness to a golden opportunity "to use his final months in office to continue putting his stamp on the federal judiciary."

If, as his office claims, Reid hasn't made a deal to allow the far right to slip Leslie Southwick into an Appellate Court judgeship, we will be hearing the squawking very loudly this week. Miss McConnell (R-KY) claims he will shut down the Senate if Southwick-- arguably the worst judge Bush has ever nominated (a nearly unfathomable standard)-- is not confirmed. [A little tangent: my pal Bob Geiger has an example of the childishness of these spoiled and tantrum-prone Republicans involving Oklahoma kook Tom Coburn who is threatening to amend a "No Confidence" in Alberto Gonzales motion tomorrow with some silliness about voting No Confidence in Congress.]

Bush has named only five nominees for 13 vacant seats on the nation's influential courts of appeals -- there will be more vacancies this summer -- and moved to fill only 21 of 37 district court openings. Lawmakers and activists on both sides of the aisle see the door to new nominees being slowly shut as the administration moves into lame-duck status.

Moves into? This is the most hated man in the world and the lamest duck to ever waddle quacking around the White House. He would have a far better chance of getting his nominees confirmed in Albania and inside the Green Zone than he should have in the U.S. Senate.

"The White House understands that it needs to nominate people for judicial vacancies, especially on the courts of appeals, as soon as possible," said Curt Levey, executive director of the Committee for Justice, which supports Bush's judicial efforts. "There's only about a year to play with, and it can easily take a year to confirm a nominee who Democratic senators or groups on the left decide to target."

...Levey said the groups "reflexively label any white male judicial nominee from the South as racist." He added that further delays will "destroy the 'peace treaty' on judges" that Democrats and Republicans had reached after years of filibusters and battles over Bush's nominees.

Southwick's record speaks for itself and it is an insult to white male southerners to be tarred with a brush as racist, bigoted and vile as the one Southwick has created for himself. He may be typical of a small circle of bigoted, neo-Confederate corporate pawns to which the Bush Regime turns to for nominations but for the regime and its allies to equate that with discrimination against normal southerners is typical of their divisive and narrow partisan tactics. Its how they have run this country into the place it finds itself-- a place where the vast majority of Americans think the nation is headed in the wrong direction.

Right now Republican senators, from Arlen Spector to Lindsey Graham to John Warner are critical of Bush's inability to find acceptable or even barely qualified nominees. But that's part of the problem. The Bush/Cheney style of governance only knows "my way or the highway" and they are still unwilling to share responsibilities of governance with the other branches of government.

"There has been a long-standing practice in Republican administrations that courts of appeals nominees are the president's prerogative, period," said one conservative who is close to the nominating process and would speak only on the condition of anonymity.

If Reid isn't cutting backroom deals with them, that attitude should come to an abrupt halt this week when the Senate Judiciary Committee takes up the matter of Mr. Southwick.