Battle Over The Supreme Court Is Joined... Except There Is No Nominee

Will Florida's gay senate candidate rate Obama's Supreme Court nominees or does that get left for Cheney too?

Yesterday a militant right-wing fringe group, Scott Wheeler's National Republican Trust PAC, threatened each Republican senator that if he or she voted to confirm Obama's Supreme Court nominee, there would be serious consequences. The extremists have little to worry about since the GOP targets of those threats have already put together a plan to obstruct whomever Obama nominates.

CBS released a poll this morning that shows "most Americans are confident the president will pick a good nominee." Only a third are "uneasy" with who he's liable to come up with. That's the audience the GOP senators are playing to with their obstructionism. Last night Rahm Emanuel anonymously leaked a list of likely prospects and this morning the NY Times and most major news outlets reprinted or rebroadcast this list. Was it real or was Emanuel just getting the pack off the scent? Supposedly Obama hasn't decided yet but will try to over the weekend.

Except James Comey, all the names being bandied about look pretty good and seem really excellent, especially Elena Kagan, Pamela Karlan, Sonia Sotomayor and Diane Wood.

Media outlets are all vying to get Dick Cheney to agree to come on their shows and voice his opinions and Democratic strategists are secretly hoping for the same. Republican office holders are at their wit's end with Cheney, knowing full well that he is poisoning the well for the GOP. "Cheney," writes Dan Balz in today's Washington Post, "is the most visible-- and controversial-- critic of President Obama's national security policies and, to the alarm of many people in the Republican Party, the most forceful and uncompromising defender of the Bush administration's record. His running argument with the new administration has spawned a noisy side debate all its own: By leading the criticism, is Cheney doing more harm than good to the causes he has taken up and to the political well-being of his party?" I don't know why there's a question mark at the end of that sentence.

"He's perfectly entitled to make his case, and given that Dick Cheney is as popular as Britney Spears at a Sunday school teacher convention, we hope he continues to be the face of the Republican Party," said Hari Sevugan, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. "His continued presence reminds people that the GOP is unwilling to put forward new ideas or leadership, and so long as he continues to be the voice of the Republican cause, he ensures that the Republican Party will remain the party of the past."

Getting Cheney on one of the Sunday talking heads shows to come on and denounce whomever Obama picks as his first Supreme Court nominee is considered the biggest and juiciest plum among the TV news bookers. Alternative critics of the pick could be Miss America sore loser Carrie Prejean, Minnesota sociopath Michele Bachmann, or maybe a new face, like the dean of the unaccredited Buy Bull "college" where Jeff Sessions studied or-- taking a counterintuitive tack, a GOP candidate trying to distance himself from the crazy right-wing party he's saddled with, like Charlie Crist in Florida or Chris Christie in New Jersey.