Catching up on that little court story

July 20, 2005 By

Mercy! What a 48 hours or so to disappear into the zoo of I-95 while listening to the latest Harry Potter novel. It seems that I have missed a minor development up here in the greater Washington area.

My work on the blog will be spotty in the days ahead. Verizon will not have the just-moved Mattingly family’s DSL up and running for a week or so. At least that is what the computerized Ms. Darth Vader said in the company’s hellish automated service system. My fair wife was switched around and cut off three times. Also, I don’t start work on the Hill at the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities until August 1. My Scripps Howard News Service column this a.m. — the second of two columns (here’s the first) on the mini-media storm involving The New York Times, the popes and evolution — should have opened with this credit line: “Today’s column is brought to you with the assistance of Panera Bread.” Try the Cobblestone.

Anyway, it seems that Newsweek may have nailed the heart of the Supreme Court story this past week. Check here for a refresher. The big idea was that the country-club side of the GOP was worried that “an obsessive focus on abortion and gay marriage will jeopardize what they regard as a once-in-a-generation chance to unshackle commerce from the grip of federal regulators.”

So, crucial to the success of the John Roberts nomination is the media spin that the libertarian side of the yin-yang GOP is happy and that the Religious Right is not too happy. But who is actually happy? How would we know? Who will find out if this guy ever sits in a pew?

Of course, in the age of the blogosphere, the quickest way to catch up on this drama within the drama is to turn to media-hot blogs on both sides. For starters, you turn — naturally — to Andrew Sullivan. Here is a link near the start of his blitz into fretting and praise, as he relaxes for a few months and then rides more tense emails and then repeats the cycle. The bottom line is that if Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard and other cultural conservatives believe they have reason to worry, then there is reason for the Lifestyle Left to hope. More than ever, Sullivan is a must read for the next few weeks (and you know the elite reporters are reading him).

Meanwhile, the blog crew at Christianity Today already has a link-happy report online about religion-turf reactions. Enquiring minds want to know, of course, what the human warning siren on the Religious Right thought of the nomination. Here is a piece of Collin Hansen’s report:

The question of judicial philosophy is central because Roberts did not deliver an opinion on the D.C. court about abortion, religious symbolism, gay rights, or many other contentious social issues. For these reasons, Roberts may avoid the combative confirmation process that so many groups have been predicting and promising since Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her retirement July 1. However, this same fact renders him somewhat mysterious, even for supporters.

“To my knowledge Judge Roberts has never talked about abortion and he certainly has no rulings about it, so we don’t know what his private views are,” said James Dobson, chairman of Focus on the Family. “But we do know that he is what Justice Scalia called an ‘originalist,’ who will interpret the Constitution as written, not dream up his decisions based on some preconceived ideology.”

Ah! But is the good doctor bluffing? Who consulted who? Who winked and who nodded?

I hope the good people here at Panera Bread in Glen Burnie will let me come back in the days ahead and find out.

P.S. Can you believe The New York Times didn’t use “beam me up” in this obituary headline? Others could not resist. Ah, that British culture.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Politics

All over but the shoutin’

July 20, 2005 By

LadyJusticeFrom the non-apocalyptic front in Supreme Court news, Ronald Brownstein writes in today’s Los Angeles Times:

In effect, Roberts may represent an effort to thread the needle in filling the court vacancy. The selection could offer Bush an opportunity to maximize his chance of a relatively smooth confirmation while minimizing the danger of either conservative disaffection or scorched-earth Democratic opposition.

As a former clerk to Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, a legal official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and a reliably conservative voice on the bench, Roberts is well-respected in Republican circles.

Conservative activists welcomed the nominee more enthusiastically than they would have Edith Brown Clement, the justice from the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals who, for part of Tuesday, was Bush’s rumored pick.

Roberts also has drawn high marks from experts in both parties for his qualifications, and may present a limited target for Democrats because he has written few decisions in his two years as a federal judge.

Ryan Lizza of The New Republic drills down to one religion angle in this nomination:

Finally, Bush did not slavishly reward his base of evangelical conservatives. Conservatives are describing Roberts as a “bold” choice. He is clearly not. Bush’s trademark, especially when it comes to his most high-profile personnel decisions, is to select hard-right nominees that spark polarizing debates and send Democrats into a spitting rage. He has done that with Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, John Bolton, and many of his lower court nominees. Considering the importance of the high court to his most rabid supporters, there was every reason to believe Bush would choose a more ideological conservative than Roberts. The more brass knuckles and base-pleasing Judge Michael Luttig apparently made it to the end of the sweepstakes, but was passed over for the more moderate, more even-tempered, and more easily confirmable Roberts. After 15 years of crying “No more Souters,” the religious right has been presented with someone whose views on many social issues are as mysterious to them as their judicial bête noir’s were in 1990.

. . . The only similar big decision this recalls is Bush’s needle-threading announcement on stem cells back in August 2001 when his political fortunes were sagging and moderate voices in the White House steered him towards a compromise position. As in that case, Bush seems to be getting everything he wants. He is nudging the Supreme Court to the right. He has a good chance of getting a smooth conformation process. He seems to have satisfied his evangelical base. He may even win some political capital to spend on the rest of his agenda. Maybe Bush will even learn that sometimes the politics of conciliation pay more dividends than the politics of confrontation. If so, then this would truly be a historic choice.

Photo credit: Justin T. Johnson, Washington.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Politics

The Robert Bork hearings were easy

July 19, 2005 By

Here’s a story about the nomination of Judge John Roberts.

And here is the text of Roberts’ smile-for-the-cameras remarks.

Three things:

1) Never let it be said that George W. Bush is one to back down from a fight.

2) There will be a fight.

3) And this nomination goes to show that, in William Goldman’s words, “Nobody knows nothin’.” Who predicted the Roberts pick? I did a fair bit of reading leading up to this nomination and never once ran across his name.

And to all a good night.

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Filed Under: Journalism, People, Politics

GOP, churches, corporations, courts

July 15, 2005 By

One of the ongoing themes here at GetReligion is that it is hard to jam the MSM into either a pure liberal or pure conservative camp. Here’s a sample of that from a few weeks ago. Instead of old-fashioned left and right, what the media research finds is a consistent pattern of libertarianism on moral and social issues. Thus, the constant tension between the MSM and traditional religious believers.

This divide exists — big time — inside the Republican Party, more so than among Democrats. The heart of the modern Democratic Party is the sexual revolution. That’s where you find the issues on which the party cannot compromise and, thus, we see that pattern in the MSM.

Now, the yin-yang Republicans can compromise on all kinds of things and this often shows up in news reports (often when someone like James Dobson threatens to walk out). But the GOP knows that the religious traditionalists have no place to go, sort of like the labor people in the Democratic Party. So a George W. Bush can court the country club at the same time as the traditional sanctuary.

For a great example of this, see the current Newsweek article on the teams working behind the scene at the Supreme Court war. You think the following paragraph from the Howard Fineman and Holly Bailey essay isn’t being handed around in Colorado Springs? You think the Dobson squad isn’t worried about the likes of Ed Gillespie?

Keeping Republicans and their conservative kin together won’t be easy. For the first time in a nomination fight, corporate lobbyists are determined to play a leading public role. They are concerned that an obsessive focus on abortion and gay marriage will jeopardize what they regard as a once-in-a-generation chance to unshackle commerce from the grip of federal regulators. To hold their hands, they have not only Gillespie—whose lobbying firm maintains a roster of big-business clients—but former senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, the actor-lawyer-lobbyist, who signed on as the “sherpa” who will walk at least one Bush nominee through the confirmation process (think Virgil in Dante’s “Inferno”).

I think the word “obsessive” sort of jumps out, don’t you think?

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Filed Under: Politics, Social Issues

Teddy the K

July 14, 2005 By

TeddytheK2Yesterday, Ted Kennedy . . . ah, you’ll never believe this one no matter how much I explain it. Let’s go to the AP:

In a rare personal attack on the Senate floor, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy accused Sen. Rick Santorum on Wednesday of being self-righteous and insensitive for a column he wrote three years ago linking Boston’s liberalism to the sex abuse scandal in its Catholic diocese.

Santorum, R-Pa., wrote in the July 2002 column for Catholic Online that promoting alternative lifestyles feeds such aberrant behavior as priests molesting children.

“Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture,” Santorum wrote. “When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.”

I searched in vain to find the column in question on Catholic Online (if a GetReligion reader finds it, please post the link in comments). A cynic [That's you! -- ed.] might say that Kennedy took this long to bring up the piece because Santorum wasn’t up for reelection in 2002.

The only quibble I would have with the AP’s coverage is when the reporter tried to squeeze a comment out of the governor of Massachusetts: “Mitt Romney, a Republican who — like Santorum — has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate in 2008, called the remarks unfortunate but did not ask for an apology, said spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom.”

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Filed Under: Catholicism, People, Politics

This house is crumbling / who’ll say the last amen?

July 12, 2005 By

The New York Times‘ conservative primatologist David Kirkpatrick makes two questionable assertions in the first paragraph of his report on religious conservatives’ reaction to that abomination known as the Kelo decision. See if you can spot them:

Conservative Christian groups seeking to galvanize support for a battle over a Supreme Court nomination are rallying around the unlikely symbol of a mega-church in Los Alamitos, Calif., one of a handful of houses of worship that have tangled with towns over the use of eminent domain to take their properties.

Give up? Here’s the graph again, with added emphases:

Conservative Christian groups seeking to galvanize support for a battle over a Supreme Court nomination are rallying around the unlikely symbol of a mega-church in Los Alamitos, Calif., one of a handful of houses of worship that have tangled with towns over the use of eminent domain to take their properties.

Kirkpatrick grants that Cottonwood Christian Center has tangled with Los Alamitos pols over eminent domain issues in the past, but he plays up the fact that the church managed to beat back the taking. He refers to the ubiquitous “many legal experts” saying that people shouldn’t have a cow.

After all, Kirkpatrick writes, “a federal appeals court ultimately blocked the condemnation of Cottonwood’s property.” Further, he refers again to “experts” who “note that a federal law, many state laws and the First Amendment make it virtually impossible to focus on religious institutions for condemnation, to say nothing of political resistance to tearing down church buildings.”

So there. The fears are unfounded and the symbol is really an empty, “unlikely” one.

Hey, The New York Times says it. It must be true.

[Cue rim shot -- ed.]

For the real scoop on what happened to Cottonwood, we turn not to the paper of record but to the website of the Beckett Fund, a group that litigates on behalf of religious liberties. The story goes:

Several years ago, [the overcrowded members of Cottonwood] raised funds to purchase property to build a much larger facility. They spent more than a year buying up parcels from multiple landowners, finally sewing up a 17.9 acre property in a redevelopment area near the Los Alamitos Race Course at a cost of $13 million. The property purchased by the church had been largely vacant for decades.

They drew up plans for a 300,000 square foot worship center with seating for more than 4,700, a youth center, daycare center, gymnasium, and other facilities to serve the congregation.

In October 2000, Cottonwood filed an extensive application for a Conditional Use Permit (“CUP”), that went well beyond the city’s requirements. But a few weeks later, the city rejected it, citing omission of a Preliminary Design Review, despite the fact that the application itself states that such a review is optional. The following day (a Friday), the city sent the church a letter — by ordinary mail — informing them of a City Council meeting on Monday, at which it would adopt a moratorium on any new permit applications in the redevelopment area.

The moratorium lasted more than a year, during which the city sought interest from potential commercial developers. Finally, having secured interest from Costco Corporation, the big warehouse retail store chain, in February 2002 the City Council conceded that it had improperly rejected Cottonwood’s CUP application. But at the very same time, the Council approved an “Exclusive Negotiation Agreement” with Costco, and in April, the Redevelopment Agency selected a development proposal from Costco despite the fact that it doesn’t own the land, and that a retail outlet is not a permitted use under current zoning for the property.

To shorten a much longer story, Cottonwood filed suit and the city retaliated by starting eminent domain proceedings. A federal court ultimately forced a settlement in which the city had to buy land near the area of the planned church and swap it out for the land that Cottonwood had purchased.

But all of this occurred under a much different legal regime than the one that exists after Kelo. Now, it is very likely that Cottonwood would be forced to give up the land and be lucky to get its money back in the deal.

Kirkpatrick accidentally gives away the game when he admits that the justice who warned that, under Kelo, churches are likely to be bulldozed to make way for retail outlets, was not rightwing firebrands Scalia or Thomas, or even that old horse Rehnquist, but Sandra Day O’Connor.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Journalism, Politics, Religion

Judge dread

July 9, 2005 By

Readers of GetReligion are not allowed to enjoy this paragraph. Don’t even think about it:

TV news crews and an Associated Press photographer waited in pelting rain for three hours Friday morning for [Chief Justice William] Rehnquist to emerge from his suburban Virginia town house. He eventually did, wishing reporters a good morning. When asked about retirement rumors, he answered, “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” before getting into a waiting car.

It’s from Gina Holland’s excellent AP story on Supreme Court retirement rumors currently swirling around that cauldron of gossip and innuendo called Washington, D.C.

Holland does a good job of showing both the pack mentality of journalists and the massive uncertainty that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor created when she announced her retirement. Right now, anything seems possible, and my fellow ink- (and pixel-) stained toilers don’t want to be the second to know:

The press room at the Supreme Court was filled, a rarity during a time when the court is not in session. And the rumors flew.

E-mails to reporters from various groups speculated when Rehnquist would make an announcement and also speculated about other possibilities.

Justice John Paul Stevens, who is 85 and healthy, may be going, the speculation went. Stevens is the court’s liberal leader and would seem an unlikely prospect with a Republican in the White House and GOP-controlled Senate.

He also has already started hiring law clerks to work for him in 2006-07. That could be a sign that he’s sticking around for a while. Or that he’s sneaky and wants to keep reporters off his trail. [If so, there are going to be some pissed off Yale law students in the fall -- ed.]

Next came hints that the real retirement would be that of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the petite opera lover President Bill Clinton put on the bench in 1993.

The one bit of speculation that Holland didn’t sneak into the piece is that the chief justice delayed the announcement of his retirement in deference to the recent ugliness in London. He might have considered it in poor form to announce his departure so soon after the president got caught in the middle of another terror dustup while in Scotland.

Whatever the case, there’s a sense in this city that we’re in for it: multiple confirmations; vitriolic arguments about abortion; charges of dishonesty and cronyism; charges of a coup d’état by liberals; rent garments over potential betrayal by conservatives; and generally lots and lots of speechifying.

It’s likely to start off nasty and get worse as Bush’s second term drags on. The press has had this unfortunate tendency to reduce the issue of judges to arguments about abortion and school prayer, but the disgust with the court by people loosely grouped together under the banner of the political right is fairly ecumenical and far-reaching.

For instance, a source in New Hampshire tells me there is reason to be optimistic that efforts to bulldoze Justice David Souter’s mum’s house over the Kelo ruling stand at least a fighting chance. If the home wreckers succeed, would Souter retire early or cling on to the bitter end? There hasn’t been a lot of talk about this in D.C. because news that some locals were trying to bring it to a vote was, roughly speaking, laughed out of polite society.

But politeness only goes so far. Many of the justices are getting long in the tooth, and the time for speculation is now. Will John Paul Stevens be able to make it to the end of Bush’s second term? Will Ginsburg? Will Bush make good on his deal with the right to reshape the court along more rigorous originalist lines? And will we have a fistfight on the floor of the Senate before this is all over?

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Filed Under: Politics

Get your Freak on

July 7, 2005 By

It appears to be abortion week at GetReligion, so I don’t feel too bad about this shameless plug. Several weeks back, an editor from Beliefnet (host of Blog Heaven) approached me about a project that her website had in mind. There was this new book called Freakonomics, maybe I’d heard of it . . .

Beliefnet had permission to run an excerpt, and the site wanted a pro-lifer to subject Levitt and company to some scrutiny. I was asked to criticize the book’s abortion arguments on ethical grounds. Here’s the setup in the piece:

[S]uppose that economists and social scientists from other disciplines subject Levitt’s conclusions to a battery of tests and find he has proved not only loose correlation but ironclad causation. In other words, suppose that more abortions do translate into lower incidence of crime, and go from there. Should that affect how we think about abortion?

Short answer: no.

My only problem with this proposal was that I didn’t want to leave readers with the impression that Levitt’s findings on abortion are unassailable, so I offered to do a piece arguing against both the economics and the ethics of the abortion arguments in Freakonomics. The website turned this offer down, but promised to link prominently to Steve Sailer’s criticism of the book, and has done so.

Fun moment along the way: I was riding the Metro from D.C. to my home in Virginia. I took my seat along with a young woman who I’d never met.

“Well that’s weird,” I said, when I glanced over at her.

She agreed, and we traded stupid smiles.

We were both reading Freakonomics. Even more eerie: We were both on the same page in the middle of the book. Any other book and I would have started a conversation, but I didn’t want to accidentally start an argument about abortion on the Metro, so we’ll just have to add her to the long list of ones that got away.

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Filed Under: First Person, Politics, Pop Culture