Schumer Dons Kennedy's Mantle

For whatever his reason, Teddy Kennedy is not leading the charge against Judge Alito's nomination. Oh, he's nasty enough, but he's letting Chuck Schumer charge the trenches this time around.

There are two good pieces on the nomination that relate to Schumer this morning, both on RCP:

Ben Smith in New York Observer ponders why Chuck's being given a much higher profile than his normal position -- well behind New York's senior senator. It's a good history lesson; in part:

That July [2001], Mr. Schumer turned his subcommittee into a platform for hashing out the central issue of judicial confirmation: What qualifies a person to be a federal judge? With the other key members of his committee largely focused on their own chairmanships elsewhere, Mr. Schumer devoted himself to the judges.

“Chuck came with one thing that [Senator Joseph Biden of Delaware, Senator Kennedy and others] didn’t have as much of, and that’s time,” said Tom Daschle, then the Senate Majority Leader.

His first hearing in a series (“They became a little famous,” Mr. Schumer says; “people still cite them”) was titled “Should Ideology Matter?”

The move surprised the Judiciary Committee’s Republicans.

“The courts subcommittee primarily handled court administration—but it’s the Senate, and your jurisdiction is as broad as you can make your argument to be,” said Makan Delrahim, then the Republican counsel to the full committee.

The hearings proceeded through the summer and resumed in 2002, serving as a kind of a backup document to the Senate Democrats’ filibuster of Judge Estrada and several other nominees.

They drew criticism from Republicans: The ranking member on the subcommittee, Senator Orrin Hatch, labeled Mr. Schumer’s call to return to open evaluations of ideology a “historic misstep.” The next fall, as Mr. Schumer led a hearing about the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals titled “The Importance of Balance on the Nation’s Second-Highest Court,” Mr. Hatch griped that “the premise of this hearing reminds me of a nickname that some clever college freshman gave to one of his required first-year courses: Introduction to the Obvious.”

And after Republicans retook the Senate in the 2002 midterm elections, Mr. Schumer’s seminars came to a halt.

But the damage had been done to the notion that asking nominees about ideology would be an unfair “litmus test.”

As one who is fed up with the hypocrisy of the current process and thinks it's about time we recognize why presidents pick particular candidates, I'm with Schumer on this -- but nothing much else. I happen to believe, for example, that there's still a place for respect and honesty in politics.

Charles Krauthammer writes today about distorting Judge Alito's record, focusing on the issue Schumer's picking at like a scab: abortion.

With all of Schumer's attention on the issue, you'd think he is a major recipient of Emily's List and other abortion campaign funding ... but he's not. His campaign contributions come overwhelmingly from one source: Banking and finance.

That's not surprising since he's from the Wall Street state. And it may be why Kennedy and the other Dem Sen leadership has pushed him to the front. It's so transparent when someone like Babs Boxer argues for abortion. With $317,814 from Emily's list -- six times more than from her second largest contributor -- the woman has zero credibility on the issue.