Inside Politics

Targeting Durbin

Sen. Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, will be targeted in a TV ad campaign that begins today in his home state and throughout the nation.

The ads criticize Mr. Durbin for his “unacceptable comparisons” of U.S. troops stationed at Guantanamo Bay with such genocidal regimes as Nazi concentration camps, the Soviet gulag and Pol Pot’s Cambodian “killing fields.”

The ad campaign, titled “Tortured Words,” is sponsored by the nonprofit group Move America Forward, whose mission is to support American troops fighting the war on terrorism. The ads have been “paid for exclusively from thousands of contributions” to MAF’s Web site in the past week, the group said.

Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan “feel betrayed” by Mr. Durbin, and military personnel have been “some of the most generous contributors to the ad campaign,” said Howard Kaloogian, founder and co-chairman of Move America Forward.

Melanie Morgan, co-chairman of MAF, says Mr. Durbin “should not only be censured by his Senate colleagues, but he should resign from the U.S. Senate.” Miss Morgan and Mr. Kaloogian formerly headed the successful “Recall Gray Davis” campaign in their state of California.

Mr. Durbin went to the floor of the Senate to apologize for his remarks, after resisting doing so for a week.

Bush’s opportunity

“On Oct. 23, 1987 — a day that lives in conservative infamy — Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by a Democratic Senate. Now, 18 years later, George W. Bush has the chance to reverse this defeat, and to begin to fulfill what has always been one of the core themes of modern American conservatism: the relinking of constitutional law and constitutional jurisprudence to the Constitution,” Weekly Standard editor William Kristol writes at www.weeklystandard.com.

“The restoration of constitutional government has been the one area in which modern conservatism has had the least success. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, conservative economic policies have been (more or less) pursued, and, when pursued, have been vindicated. From Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, conservative foreign policies based on American strength and American principles have been — when pursued — remarkably successful. One might even say that, in both economics and foreign policy, the degree of conservative success has been far greater than anyone would have imagined in 1980,” Mr. Kristol said.

“But in the area of constitutionalism, conservative goals have been thwarted, and the key moment of failure, from which conservative constitutionalism has never recovered, was the Bork defeat in 1987. For the last 18 years, constitutional jurisprudence has continued to drift away from a sound constitutionalism based on the written Constitution and a proper deference to popular self-government in many areas of public life. Bork’s defeat was both a cause and a symbol of this continued downward drift. Now, with one of the two swing votes on the Supreme Court stepping down, George W. Bush has a chance to begin to make constitutional history, as he is certainly attempting to do in foreign policy and, to a lesser degree, in economic policy.

“There are two pieces of good news to keep in mind as President Bush ponders his choice. The first is that, by contrast with the situation in 1987, the Senate has a Republican majority. The second is that President Bush can choose from among many, many well-qualified conservative constitutionalists,” he said.

“Although President Bush is understandably fond of and loyal to his attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, it’s simply a fact that Gonzales does not have the stature of several other possible candidates. I now believe that, though tempted, President Bush will leave his attorney general in his current office.”

Momentous battle

“The warm-up act was going to be the resignation of William H. Rehnquist, the chief justice. All of the interest groups were going to mobilize for a fight that didn’t matter in hopes of getting ready for the one that did.

“Then, Friday morning, Sandra Day O’Connor resigned and changed everything,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette executive editor David M. Shribman writes.

“There will be no preliminaries. The cultural wars are about to break out into the open. The summer of reflection and relaxation is about to become a season of recrimination,” Mr. Shribman said.

The columnist added: “The O’Connor resignation is no longer the fire next time. Forget the 2006 midterm congressional election. Forget the 2008 presidential election. This is the most important political fight of our time.”

Fighting back

“We are losing it,” Paul Jacobs writes in his Common Sense column at the Web site www.limitedgovernment.org.

“The First Amendment, I mean. If we have to look over our shoulders in fear of government hounds even when talking about politics on the most democratic and easy-to-access soap box ever — namely, the Internet — our freedom of speech is in [big] trouble. Not that it isn’t in plenty already,” said Mr. Jacobs, a leader of U.S. Term Limits.

“The recent McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform muzzles speech politicians don’t like — speech critical of them. If the news coming from the Federal Election Commission is any clue, things are about to get worse.

“FEC commissioner Bradley Smith, one of the good guys, notes that the regulation being proposed would open the door to stomping hardest the persons with the least resources. As he puts it, ’A wealthy guy like George Soros, who can spend his millions, or Rupert Murdoch, who can own a network, will have heightened influence. Your average small business doesn’t have that possibility. They can, however, go onto the Internet. But now we are going to say, ’”No, you can’t take it on the Internet either.”’

“We must fight back. If the new regulations are indeed imposed, let’s treat a single assault on a single Internet publisher for a single alleged free speech ’transgression’ as an assault on all of us.

“Therefore, as soon as one guy talking politics on the Net is targeted for having the wrong political opinion or linking to the wrong political Web site, every other concerned netizen should repeat the same violation. Let them bring up a million people on charges for talking out of turn, instead of just one.”

Bork’s response

Judge Robert Bork says Sen. Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, continues to misrepresent his views.

Mr. Specter, in an appearance on CNN’s “Late Edition” yesterday, said Judge Bork “had original intent, and if his original intent stood, we’d still be segregating the United States Senate with African Americans on one side and Caucasians on the other side.”

Judge Bork appeared later in the same program and responded, “I know Specter and the truth is not in him.

“I have written, and he must know it, that Brown against Board of Education, the case that ended segregation, was a correct decision. So he knows that, and I don’t know why he’s making a claim like this at this time.”

• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.