Last night, the people of my home state decided they don’t want to be represented anymore by a liberal Republican who’s been in office for over 35 years and seems to think it’s his due.
This is the worst thing that has ever happened in America this week. Just ask any liberal. Oh, look, here’s one. Jonathan Chait:
The defeat of Richard Lugar in the Indiana Republican Senate primary is the kind of event that would have been shocking just a half-dozen years ago, and has since grown routine. Incumbent senators used to have almost no fear that they might be deposed by members of their own party for ideological or partisan deviations, and now that threat has become the most powerful disciplinary tool available to activists. And it’s a tool, moreover, that is being deployed asymmetrically – the homogeneously conservative Republican Party has winnowed out virtually all its moderates, while the Democratic Party remains a looser coalition of moderates and liberals…
The most important and alarming facet of Lugar’s defeat, and a factor whose importance is being overlooked at the moment, is one of the things Mourdock cited against him: Lugar voted to confirm two of Obama’s Supreme Court nominees. Obviously, Lugar would not have chosen to nominate an Elena Kagan or a Sonia Sotomayor. But he was following a longstanding practice of extending presidents wide ideological latitude on their Supreme Court picks. In the absence of corruption, lack of qualifications, or unusual ideological extremism, Democratic presidents have always been allowed to pick liberal justices, and Republican presidents conservative ones. That’s not a law. It’s just a social norm…
The social norm against blocking qualified, mainstream Supreme Court nominees is one of the few remaining weapons the Republican Party has left lying on the ground.
Yeah. Just ask Robert Bork.
“It’s not fair that you ousted the guy who let us do whatever we wanted for decades. It’s not FAIR!!!”
Drew M. at Ace of Spades puts it best:
Liberals like Chait want to live in a world where if liberals can’t get their way all the time, they at least get to make the rules up. Liberals must curse Al Gore for inventing the Internet, because it’s one of the great tools conservatives have to push back on the liberals’ near-monopoly on the traditional media.
Liberals never break the rules unless they want something.