Conservatives are demanding that Senate Republicans take a harder line on Sonia Sotomayor, with new signs of tension between the Hill GOP and elements of the Republican base over the direction the opposition should move in the Supreme Court fight.
In a letter to be delivered to Senate Republicans Tuesday, more than 145 conservatives -- including Grover Norquist, Richard Viguerie and Gary Bauer -- call for a filibuster of Sotomayor's nomination if that's what it takes to force a "great debat"” over judicial philosophy.
But in an interview with POLITICO, Manuel Miranda -- who orchestrated the letter -- went much farther, saying that Mitch McConnell should "consider resigning" as Senate minority leader if he can’t take a harder line on President Barack Obama’s first Supreme Court nominee.
Miranda accused McConnell of being "limp-wristed" and "a little bit tone deaf" when it comes to judicial nominees.
"Miranda, now the chairman of the conservative Third Branch Conference, served as counsel to McConnell’s predecessor, then-Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist," Politico reports. "He left that job in 2004 amid allegations that he improperly accessed thousands of memos and emails from Democratic staffers -– circumstances McConnell's supporters recalled as they pushed back hard against Miranda's arguments Monday."
In this case, "irony" is spelled H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y. Before Third Branch Conference rebranded itself, it was the National Coalition to End Judicial Filibusters -- an astroturf group put together to help Bush ram through judicial nominees and which supported the "nuclear option" of changing senate rules to ban the filibuster of judicial nominees.
But now that a Democrat has nominated someone Miranda doesn't like, the filibuster is just the best freakin' thing ever invented. Besides, there's a difference between a Republican filibuster and a Democratic filibuster. What that difference actually is seems to be something of a mystery. But in his letter [PDF], Miranda tells us that this mysterious distinction is all-important:
[N]o credible person, if any, has called on Senate Republicans to brandish a "Democratic filibuster." We call on you instead to display leadership, if the nominee merits it, in preparing for the use of the traditional filibuster, not intended to obstruct, together with moderate Democrats, so that the debate on the Senate floor is appropriately long and, therefore, suitably catalyzed to the American people.
If that distinction isn't exactly clear to you, you're not alone -- it doesn't make a damned bit of sense to me either. Shamelessness always seems to be a defining characteristic of the right.
