Here we go again - They'll cut off their nose...

A little lesson from the past...

-David Skinner on the David Souter hysteria:

It's the summer of the second year of the Bush administration, trouble is brewing in Iraq and a seat has come open on the Supreme Court. I'm talking about 1990, of course. But the similarities are suggestive, and one lesson to be taken from that year is that a Republican president can nominate an actual liberal for the High Court and the left will still go nuts.

The National Organization for Women, People for the American Way, and the NAACP all screamed like cuckoo birds when President George H.W. Bush nominated David Souter, a little known New Hampshire state supreme court justice. But as we can easily see in retrospect, Souter was the ultimate "stealth candidate," his great attraction being that not even his backers knew what he really believed. Souter seemed to have practicedl aw almost in secret. This lack of a paper trail helped turn the discussion to his also nonexistent private life.

"This is a man who has never been married, never had children," noted one widely quoted observer, a prominent lawyer who, reported R.W. Apple Jr. in the New York Times, "asked not to be identified because he practices from time to time before the Court." Thellawyer continued: "This is a man who has spent only a minimum of time in the public sector, who lives in a village of 2,000 people, almost all of whom are white, far from the crises of crime and drugs, in a state that is notorious for its social and political quirkiness. Is he really equipped to deal with great national questions?"

This statement was quoted and alluded to so often that Souter soon became pegged as the Curious Bachelor from New England. Harvard law professor Duncan Kennedy commented at the time: "It would be a delicious and amusing twist in the play between liberals and conservatives, if the liberals started proclaiming that only a married man with 2.3 children living in a suburb was qualified for office."

But the left did not stop there. Calling Souter "at best, very weird"--as NPR's Nina Totenberg did--was only the beginning. Feminists were particularly agitated. "Almost Neanderthal" is how Molly Yard, then-president of the National Organization for Women described Souter, whose "constitutional views are based on the 'original intent' of the Framers 200 years ago, when blacks were slaves and women were property of their husbands." (So that's what strict constructionism means!) "David Souter would be the fifth vote" for outlawing abortion, said Eleanor Smealof the Fund for the Feminist Majority. "We find him a devastating threat." . . .