Congress Watch: Court fight yet another battle for Specter
The understanding in Washington is that the process of replacing Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court will be a raucous spectacle of political partisanship tending toward either tragedy or farce. And one of the most curious plot points in the whole drama is that the task of avoiding a complete and total disaster will fall to the reliably unpredictable Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Last week, the 75-year-old Specter declared himself ready for the task. But with all the battles that he must wage, disputes he must mediate, and causes he must advance this summer, mere survival would be a triumph for the five-term GOP moderate who has raised political and personal survival to an art form.
He survived the disdain of authoring the single-bullet theory to explain the Kennedy assassination; he survived being the only Republican senator to cast his vote against Robert Bork in committee; he survived a 1992 year-of-the-woman challenge for his seat after his questioning of Anita Hill; and he survived casting the oddest vote (not proven) at the conclusion of the Clinton impeachment trial.
But Specter cannot rest on his laurels. Indeed, he may not get to rest at all. With both sides compulsively suspicious of him, Specter must get Bush's nominee through confirmation hearings that are likely to resemble a kill-or-be-killed political dogfight. He promises to move an asbestos bailout bill to the floor that would establish a fund for asbestos victims and that would limit lawsuits against manufacturers and insurance companies. And he promises to lead to the fight in the Senate for approval of expanded federally funded research on embryonic stem cells. And of course he must do it while battling stage IV-b Hodgkin's disease, which has required him to undergo chemotherapy treatments every other Friday.
"I feel fine," he proclaimed last week. "You haven't noticed any hesitancy in my responses." No hesitancy, but the typical Specter ambiguity. Asked if he had suggested any names to the president for the high court, Specter said no, adding that he prefers it that way: Too much consultation might curtail his independence, he implied.
"I wasn't asked," he said, " . . . and there is greater latitude by senators who have not given advice . . . . You could give advice and then not consent after you've given advice, but it would not be quite so easy."
That is not the kind of analysis that conservatives want to hear from Specter, who has long been a thorn in their side. Since he cast the decisive vote that doomed the nomination of Robert Bork in 1987, Specter has been on the conservative hit list for not playing ball. He survived a tough GOP primary for re-election last year and had to fight for his right to chair the Judiciary Committee after suggesting in a post-election news conference that a Supreme Court nominee who openly wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade and the right to abortion would have a tough time getting confirmed by the Senate. But survival and persistence in the face of long odds along with an almost obsessive desire not to be seen as anybody's "boy," not to be pushed around, are the hallmarks of Specter's career, and he is signaling that not much has changed.
"So the independence and separation of power, I think," he said, sputteringly, "after having thought about it long and hard, is best served by not giving advice and performing the consent function."
Very curious. Very Specter.
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