The AP reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the controversial Texas redistricting map that Tom DeLay engineered.

Keep in mind that Samuel Alito considers that voting rights stuff as just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.
 

The GOP must be getting nervous about the nomination of Samuel Alito.  There is no other explanation for their recent bizarre behavior.

Matt Stoller over at MyDD points out that henchmen assigned to work the nomination are now issuing threats against Senators Kennedy and Biden if they exercise their role under the Constitution by actually trying to find out if Alito has the character and moral fitness to serve on the nation's highest court.

And now, Senator Bill "Insider Trader" Frist is threatening the nuclear option to fend off a filibuster threat that has yet to be uttered by Democrats.

President Bush is widely expected to appoint Judge Samuel A. Alito, to the Supreme Court today.

This is an obviously craven political move by a President weakened by scandals and political missteps.

Rather than doing what's right for the country, the President has decided to appease the most radical elements of his party in an attempt to shore up his political standing.

Now that Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court, we must now turn our attention to the next nominee.  Given the beating that President Bush has taken over Miers, there is little doubt that he will nominate someone with bullet-proof right wing credentials.

Given the numbers, it will be very difficult for the Democrats to block a nominee, no matter how disgustingly out of step they are with the views of the American people, but they can use the confirmation process to educate the public about just how far out of step the right wing cabal is.

During the ill-fated Miers effort, there was peripheral discussion of  Griswold v. Connecticut.  Senator Spector probed Miers for her views on Griswold.  Ann Coulter took Miers to task for not immediately repudiating Griswold.

According to ABC News, Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination to the Supreme Court.

So now the only question is, will President Bush now do the right thing for the country, or will he give in the the darkest elements of his party's base?

With this news from today's Washington Times, it can only be a matter of time before Miss Miers is withdrawing her nomination to the Supreme Court.

Two longtime leaders of the conservative movement yesterday called for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court.
    "We expected President Bush to appoint a woman with the opposite judicial philosophy and paper trail of Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- our disappointment is acute," said Phyllis Schlafly, founder and president of the St. Louis-based Eagle Forum.
    Mrs. Schlafly joined pioneering conservative fundraiser Richard Viguerie and other, lesser-known leaders on the pro-family right yesterday in announcing the formation of a coalition, WithdrawMiers.org.
    They described it as a "multipronged campaign to urge the withdrawal of Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court."

For five long years, the various elements of the conservative movement swallowed hard and overlooked their differences in hope's that the election and re-election of George W. Bush would bring their various and sometimes competing views of a conservative Utopia into being.

But alas, it was not meant to be.

Now the arguments are moving beyond the simple question of whether or not to support the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and has begun to reveal the deep underlying fissures within the movement.

In this piece by Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, ironically titled, "Taxing Our Tolerance," Perkins shreds Grover Norquist for his appearance before the Log Cabin Republicans.

Yesterday, it was revealed that Harriet Miers once filled out a questionairre for Texans United For Life, saying that she would support a constitutional amendment to ban all abortions, except to save a woman's life.

I suppose that the conclusion that you draw from that depends a great deal on what you already believe about Harriet Miers.

If you think she has a keen legal mind, I suppose you could conclude that she must have carefully analyzed the legal situation and decided that amending the Consitution was the only way to resolve the abortion issue consistent with her anti-abortion views.  That would suggest that she believes that Roe was rightly decided and that the only way around it was to amend the Constitution.

Perhaps the Bush administration communications team should ban movie watching the night before national television appearances for senior administration officials.

Here are some of Condi Rice's comments regarding Harriet Miers on Fox News Sunday:

Rice said she has worked closely with Miers, the White House counsel and a former deputy chief of staff, on international legal issues such as a president's wartime powers.

ABC News is reporting that President Bush is now saying that Harriet Miers religious views are a big part of the reason he chose her for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Very interesting.   Do you remember back in July, when the Republicans said that any discussion of Justice Roberts Catholicism was off limits?

Congressional Republicans warned Democrats on Monday not to make Judge John G. Roberts's Roman Catholic faith an issue in his confirmation hearings for a seat on the Supreme Court, reviving a politically potent theme from previous battles over judicial appointees.