Christie had denied tenure to Justice John Wallace, a black jurist, and that required a replacement. The Democrats insisted that Christie nominate a “diverse” candidate. Christie came up with a twofer—black and gay. Bruce Harris, mayor of the city of Chatham, is black and would therefore not change the color composition of the court, but as an openly-gay man would add another diversity category. But there’s diversity, and there’s diversity. One diversity too many for the Democrat-controlled judiciary committee. Harris is a Republican.
Harris would have been a ground-breaker as the third black to be appointed to the court, but the very first openly-gay man. But it’s not to be. The committee grilled Harris for nearly five hours, then concluded that he was a lightweight lawyer. That never stopped New Jersey politicians in the past. Perfect example—former Joisy judge and current Fox legal mal-analyst Andrew Napolitano.
The committee, by a partisan 7 to 6 vote, also found Harris’s candor about his plan to recuse himself from any case involving same-sex marriage which might come before the court to be a negative. The Democrats claimed their reasoning was that on highly-contentious legal matters, only a full court should hear the cases. In reality, it angered them that a gay judge might actually have the integrity to remove himself from hearing a case in which he has a strong personal interest.
During the hearing, Harris described how he faced racism and homophobia in his native Iowa, but was welcomed, along with his partner of thirty-two years in New Jersey. After being rejected by the committee, he seemed a bit unnerved that even though he is a minority of a minority, the one minority which isn’t acceptable to Democrats is a member of the Republican Party.
Too bad for Harris. He could have secured the seat on the bench if he had just said “Trayvon Martin was an innocent black victim of a racist white supremacist in a racist state. I would never allow that to happen in New Jersey.” That’s horse manure, of course, yet it’s the kind of thing the Democrats wanted to hear but didn’t. Instead, they heard from an honest man who made it clear he would put the interests of justice above his own personal feelings. As long as the Democrats control the state senate, that kind of honesty is political suicide.
I don’t think that I’m going out on a limb by declaring that by the Democrats’ own standards, this is a travesty. Qualifications are irrelevant, only “victim” status matters. Therefore, New Jersey Democrats are both racist and homophobic.
19 comments:
"There's diversity and there's diversity."
You said it!
tryanmax: Ain't it the truth? I'll never understand how the left and Obama think they can get away with these double-standards forever. At least they didn't call the nominee an Oreo, so I suppose that's some kind of improvement.
Hawk
Dealing with Dems is like crossing the mountains. Once you have crossed the mountains guess what, more mountains.
Interesting that they, the Dems, never seem to be happy with any thing unless it is their absolute control of everything. Even then they are not totally happy. I guess they are just destined to be unhappy.
Tehachapi Tom: I think they really are an unhappy lot. Most of their frontline politicians look constipated all the time.
Andrew said:
the one minority which isn’t acceptable to Democrats is a member of the Republican Party.
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*Shrugs* Parties tend to demand a certain loyalty to their idealogies and themselves, even from judges.
It doesn't matter who you sleep with or what color you are, if politicians believe that you are too out of sync with their legal philosophy, then they will oppose you (unless some deal has been worked out).
Anthony, it reminds me of the man who cried fa88ot in his run for the 2004 Democrat presidential candidacy, and yes, it was none other than Howard Dean. Why did he say this, because the person who questioned him was none other than a Republican who was also openly gay.
In fact, the disturbing fact here should be that to plenty of people, their political party is their religion. In all honesty, if a Republican was a real scumbag by my standards, and I couldn't condone his qualities in a leader, I would vote Democrat, but the sad part is, in New Jersey, they are so hyper-partisan that they are unwilling to do it the other way around, this is disturbing, and why they couldn't at least reason the possibility of the judicial candidate being as liberal as Arnold Schwarzenegger shows pretty plainly how hyper-partisan they are...
Sheesh!
It's perfectly understandable that a party would want to press its own ideology. But Democrats are routinely dishonest about what their ideology is. They extol "diversity" and "compromise" as two of the highest virtues, yet when the opportunity arises to employ compromise in the name of diversity, they reject both.
Anthony: You caught the gist of the article perfectly. There are no acceptable or "good" minorities to leftists. There are only useful minorities. Any member of a minority group who doesn't march in lockstep with the leftist agenda ceases to be a minority and becomes an enemy.
ideology trumps diversity. When the senate which advises and consents the executive is of a different political party, it's really hard to avoid the politics which is a shame. I do gain a greater appreciation for why President's from Nixon to Bush the first have made appointments that backfired
Anthony, I plead not guilty! LOL! Lawhawk said that, not me. This doesn't surprise me in the least. Ideology always trumps other considerations like diversity. No shock really.
obiwan: Kneejerk, blind partisanship has damaged both parties, though it tends to be far more endemic in the Democratic Party. The growth of the segment of voters identifying as independent is a result of the disgust with purely partisan thinking. It's one thing to be loyal to a party (in many ways, it makes good sense), quite another to support a party or its candidate despite massive failure and moral bankruptcy. At times blind loyalty even produces the odd result of voting completely against one's own self-interest. If the party says it's a good thing, I must support it even though I will be unnecessarily harmed by it. No individual and no party deserves that kind of misplaced loyalty.
I've pointed out several times over the past few years on our site that I am a conservative by choice, a Republican by default. If the Republican Party ever becomes too much like the Democratic Party, I'll have to find something else. In fact, it's how I left my previous lifelong devotion to the Democratic Party.
tryanmax: Both parties are guilty of overpromising at election time, but it's a necessary evil among most Republicans, a determined way of life for most Democrats (or at least the wing of the Democratic Party which has controlled the national agenda for almost forty years now). Republicans can bend without breaking, Democrats are so rigid that they would crack if required to move more than a millimeter or two politically. My article tomorrow will address another facet of determined Democratic hypocrisy.
Tennessee: I'm old enough, and I suspect so are you, that we can remember when nominations by the executive were hassled over and argued about, but unless there was some genuine reason to do otherwise, a nominee would be confirmed even if the other party was in power. Only nominees who departed radically from mainstream American politics were rejected, and even then it was usually a close call. Judicial appointments and confirmations, more than almost any other, should be based solely on competence and ethics, with politics far behind. Precisely the opposite has become the order of the day.
Hawk, I agree about the whole knee-jerk reaction part, which is why my actual affiliation is Republican, to which I say, it doesn't mean you have to vote Republican.
From the way I have seen it, both parties are two sides of the same coin, both really have this tendency to go a little over the edge when one of their own registers as being "not conservative enough" or "not liberal enough". Although the current trend now for the GOP is who can act the leader enough to push support his way, regardless of what the standards of pure conservativism are. So far, Romney is leading the pack, but as the future is, not even I can be sure that he will keep that momentum of playing around, anticipating the Obama campaigns' moves, and pointing out key policy points that conservatives want to see (surprise visit to Solyndra), hopefully he can keep this momentum going.
The Democrats' counterpoint of ideological purity is seen by the week of fixation on Booker, who at least sounded, and I will admit I don't know him in depth, appeared concerned that perhaps the private sector might have some of the solution in Newark, Newark's severe education, employment, and crime issues. Again, he was wavering in what he said, but the fact that the left seems to regard you as an enemy for feeling uncertain raises hairs that they could very well be having their Gingrich moment (i.e. loss of energy and attack within their ranks for people not being 100 percent on board) Either way, I wonder why the left couldn't learn that GOPers like Schwarzenegger or Giuliani could very well help advance their ideas as well as their own, as is shown in this case, again, sounds like the partisanship is getting more volatile.
Andrew: Throwing me under the bus, eh? LOL
We used to have the borrowed British concept of "the loyal opposition." Republicans and Democrats were Americans first, party partisans second. Even when there were major policy differences, the parties could usually work together to find some sort of compromise. Reagan was a master at it, and Clinton as well, though to a lesser extent. The Democrats have gotten so deeply-invested in their social engineering and forced equality agenda that the good of the nation has ceased to matter.
As for what Anthony said, he is right. But we weren't really discussing party loyalty, but rather the inability of one party to accept that decent, well-meaning and competent members of the other party deserve to be granted equal respect. I don't expect Democrats to prefer Republicans, I merely expect them to accept that not everyone is a Democrat and Republicans deserve their place in the sun as well. The issue here isn't party loyalty, it's cross-party respect.
If everyone agreed on everything, there wouldn't be a need for parties. But we don't. The job of each party is to advance its own agenda while still adhering to the traditional rules of the game. We have both discussed the necessity of parties having to accept the nominees of executives from the other party unless there is some deep, fundamental and constitutional reason to withhold acceptance. In the case we're discussing today, that necessity so essential to a republican form of government has been entirely ignored for no reason greater than pure partisan political spite.
In this particular matter, party power not party loyalty was at issue. The Democrats had no logical reason to reject the nominee as being out-of-touch with the law Democrats espouse. In fact, they knew full good and well that the nominee was likely to favor their position frequently. They were angry that a gay, black man would recuse himself on the issue of gay marriage when he "should" support that agenda and be willing to participate in the decision. His rigid ethics offended them. Being a Republican certainly didn't help.
It's fine to expect ideological uniformity within a party but to reject a nominee from the other party because he isn't loyal to the opposition party's ideology is foolish, stupid, and a recipe for permanent government gridlock. Of course I expect that underneath it all, the Democratic Party would be perfectly happy if the Republican Party disappeared from the face of the earth and we all walked around holding hands in a socialist paradise governed by one party and guided by a "living Constitution."
obiwan: There are still many states in which there are moderate/conservative Democrats and moderate/liberal Republicans. In those states, I would prefer the Republican largely because numbers within a party caucus actually matter. But that practical rule would not prevent me from voting for the Democrat if the Republican was too far left and the Democrat healthily in the middle. My personal problem is that in my pathetic giant of a state, the most liberal Republicans are far more conservative than the most "conservative" Democrats. I haven't been able to consider voting for a California Democrat at any level for nearly twenty years. At least now I live in a district where my "R" vote is likely to be the majority vote. But statewide and nationally, my vote is wasted. When I was a Democrat, I could still in good conscience vote for a Republican. As a Republican now, I can't find a single reason to cross those party lines again. It's not the same for voters in many other states. Party loyalty may be a quandary in other jurisdictions, but in California the worst Republican is better than the best Democrat, so my choice is easy.
LawHawk, that is a very important bit of info you just added on, and a definite sign of the times. Democrats seem to be breaking with tradition more and more recently. Not to say this is a new habit, just a habit they have grown much more comfortable in.
tryanmax: And I suspect the public has noticed. There will always be a few bitter diehard partisans, but lately the Democrats seem to be digging in deeper for class and party warfare. Breaking with tradition is part and parcel of the disrespect for America's history and Constitution. It was lefties who are now the guiding lights of the Democratic party who first popularized the words "by any means necessary." Until the past few years, even the most hardcore Democrats tried to keep up the pretense of bipartisanship. Now they say the word, but ignore the spirit of the word.
Lawhawk
I think you have to cut the democrats some slack here. They are so lost in the collectivist fantasy world that they just cannot accept that anyman could be both
Black and Gay and be a Republican.
To a secular humanist this is akin to a sign of the Apocalypse.
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