San Diego Union Tribune October 2, 2005 ANALYSIS Down-and-out Democrats lick their wounds Lack of influence exemplified by rout in Supreme Court fight By Finlay Lewis  COPLEY NEWS SERVICE WASHINGTON – For Democrats, the battle over the Supreme Court has been perhaps the most bitter reminder yet of just how far they have fallen in Washington and how powerless they have become in influencing the future course of events. In the end, the fight to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist was a rout, and all the bluster, fiery rhetoric, millions of dollars of television advertising and threats of political retribution from liberal activist groups meant very little. And while Republicans and their allies in the conservative advocacy groups smugly look forward to what they assume will be a second victory when President Bush names his next court nominee soon, Democrats left the John Roberts battle painfully aware of just how badly they are split. For some of the 22 Senate Democrats who backed Roberts, the vote was simply a common-sense acceptance of the fact that nothing had come out in the hearings to disqualify him and the calculation that he was certain to win. For others, it was a political recognition that someday a future Democratic president would be the one doing the nominating and they would be the ones insisting that ideology alone is not enough to defeat a nominee. Democratic activists and their allies in the feminist, civil rights and environmental protection movements had hoped to use the nomination of a judicial conservative as a vehicle for portraying Bush and the congressional Republican majorities as threats to their causes. The disappointment of the liberals is acute as they try to fathom why so many Democrats backed Roberts even after he refused to delve into issues likely to come up in the future before the court. "They looked into Roberts' eyes and they saw something," said Jenny Backus, a Democratic consultant and an experienced campaign operative. "Look, for the good of the country, I hope that they are right. I fear that they are wrong." Only 11 years ago, Democrats did not have to guess about nominees and flail about in such frustration. Then, they controlled the White House, both houses of Congress and most of the governorships. But today they hold few reins of power and are watching the courts turn more and more conservative. The result is an increasingly pitched battle between liberals who demand that the party "stand for something" and those who want more appeals to the broad center of American politics. Nonpartisan political analyst Stuart Rothenberg said elected Democrats used their Roberts votes to send "a message of accommodation and compromise and acceptance." He added: "That's not a bad message for the party because Republicans portray Democrats as unreconstructed ideologues who are simply opposing, opposing, opposing. When you get Democrats supporting it, it kind of undercuts the Republican argument." So the "realists" won Round 1. Round 2 will depend in part on how conservative Bush goes when he nominates a successor to retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and how demanding the liberal activists are this time. The stakes over the O'Connor seat clearly will be higher because, unlike the Roberts nomination, this pick could alter the high court's ideological balance because of O'Connor's role as a swing vote on the closely divided court. "I don't think the Roberts vote is going to affect anything next year," said Charlie Cook, editor of a nonpartisan political report, referring to the upcoming congressional elections. "To the extent that a Supreme Court nomination fight is key, it's the next one. Not this one." Moreover, the accumulating problems now weighing on Bush – Iraq, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, gas prices, the legal and ethical problems of key GOP congressional leaders – have not disappeared. More than the Roberts nomination, those issues will define the 2006 midterm elections by possibly further inflaming the already-polarized environment in which those campaign battles will be waged. Before those elections, Democratic candidates will have to choose between working with majority Republicans or steering the more confrontational course urged by the liberals. In the Roberts battle, most of the big-name Democrats thinking of running for president in 2008 opted for confrontation, recognizing that the liberal groups wield outsize clout in the primaries and caucuses. It did not escape the notice of other politicians and of political analysts that Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana bucked the trend of many other red-state Democrats by voting against Roberts. A moderate and longtime leader of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Bayh may be hoping the anti-Roberts vote will help him gain political traction with liberal activists if, as expected, he launches a presidential candidacy for 2008. That decision placed him at odds with Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, another possible Democratic presidential candidate, who hewed to his reputation as a political maverick by voting for Roberts. Meanwhile, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, viewed by many as the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, also voted against Roberts. Tom Mann, a political analyst with the Brookings Institution, said Clinton and Bayh "made the rational calculation that their immediate political interests would be better served by not bucking those most active in the nomination process." »Next Story»