This is why I’m gonna get that McCain sticker:

All of which suggests that threats by conservative pundits like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter to take their ball and go home if McCain is the nominee make no sense (and I say this as someone who has made similar rumblings in the past). The next President likely will nominate 3-4 Supreme Court justices and 200 to 400 lower court judges. Given the astonishing longevity of Supreme Court justices, moreover, the next President’s Supreme Court picks easily could serve for two or more decades.
To consider the full implications of this prospect, consider just one of the names that appears on most short lists of prospective Democratic Supreme Court nominees: Harold Koh, dean of the Yale Law School. (YLS professor Kenji Yoshino reportedly quipped that he was hedged for 2008, because “either the Democrats will lose and Yale will keep Harold, or the Democrats will win and Yale will loan him to the country.”)
What would a Justice Koh’s jurisprudence look like? Jeffrey Rosen notes that Koh “has supported the idea that U.S. courts should expansively apply international legal precedents without the authorization of the president and Congress.” John McGinnis (.pdf) likewise observes that: “Harold Koh in fact would like to cabin American exceptionalism through the use of transnational materials to assure that American principles would cohere more with the rest of the world.” The increasing use of such precedents by the left wing of the Supreme Court, of course, has been a major irritant to conservatives.
Andrew McCarthy and Doug Kmiec have both raised concerns that a Justice Koh would handcuff the police and intelligence community by judicial fiat. A Law Blog reader quipped that, “other than that he’d be a sure vote for declaring Gitmo detainees have a constitutional right to Social Security benefits, I do not see the appeal.”
On a related point, consider his strong support for keeping military recruiters off the Yale campus. as the Yale Daily News reported, “despite a 8-0 smack down by the Supreme Court in the military recruiting case Rumsfeld v. FAIR, Koh still refused to grant ROTC equal access to the Law School.”
There can be no doubt but that Koh would be a liberal activist of a stripe we haven’t seen since Brennan and Marshall. There can be no doubt that he’ll be at or near the top of the list in an Obama or Clinton presidency.
With the CPAC promise on the record, anybody who thinks John McCain would nominate Koh or anybody remotely near him on the ideological spectrum is suffering from such an extreme case of McCain derangement syndrome that they’re beyond the help of even modern pharmapsychology.

funky chicken on February 11, 2008 at 1:51 PM

I’m not quite as sure of the Obama victory as I was a couple of days ago, actually. We focus on the ideological battle of the GOP here, but the democrats do have to appeal for votes from moderate/somewhat conservative people too. Lots of those moderate dems are also religious, and will be pretty freaked out by this stuff:

http://www.obamamessiah.blogspot.com/

Yeah, the MSM will do anything it can to hide the scary true-believer kind of Obama supporter in the general election, and Obama himself can tell them to tune it down, but when somebody has caught the evangelical zeal, it’s hard to keep them totally under wraps.

If you have somewhat religious dem friends, really, send them as many of the Obama-Messianic criticisms as possible. His speech in South Carolina is particularly creepy, as was the Oprah speech that led up to it, as Oprah’s speech was based on a TV movie where a blind black woman was seeking the Messiah.

funky chicken on February 11, 2008 at 2:03 PM