Look At Me, I'm Sandra D. By: Mark W Adams

There is certainly a new dynamic at the US Supreme Court that no one can miss. It was the theme of most of the end-of-term reports summed up and linked by Adam Chandler at SCOTUS Blog. Justice Anthony Kennedy, a jurist to the right of Sandra Day O'Connor, is THE swing vote on the Court.

Both Kennedy and O'Connor were Reagan appointees, yet this morning my ears were assaulted with the Faux Noise punditry explaining that while the Court did take a more conservative tone with O'Connor's retirement and replacement by a more ideologically pure winger; it was not, according to Brit Hume, a huge jump to the right. According to Bill Kristol, the Court could use another justice like Roberts or Alito to shore up a solid conservative ideological bloc.

Are they really talking about the same guy? Am I truly to believe that Kennedy is not "all that" conservative? The guy who they settled on after Robert Bork got ... Borked.

I swear to God, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whatever, that these people still can't get over the idea that Nixonian big stick, big spending, amoral and untouchable executive excesses has been exposed again and again as the opposite of American values and how to best run this nation. But if they had their druthers, Nixon's old Solicitor General, the guy who pulled the trigger on the infamous Saturday Night Massacre, would be there and not some fickle "moderate" swing vote. They still want their "Bork" to act as the cement for a monolithically reliable bulwark of conservative governance.

I'll note that the Hume/Kristol view is the extreme. The reliably conservative Hillary basher, Bay Buchanan, seemed very pleased with the current make-up of the court on ABC's This Week roundtable. But even she acknowledged that every GOP presidential candidate has promised they would put more Scalias on the bench. She and the conservatives who she identifies with are uninterested in polls or what the Washington Post might say, but are inspired by the likes of Scalia and Dick Cheney.

I'm sorry, that's nuts. They want their "I've got mine, everyone else is on their own" mentality to be to carved in stone, recognizing that the words chiseled in the granite above the SCOTUS entryway saying "Equal Justice Under The Law" take into account the Orwellian notion that "Some animals are more equal than others."

I have to wonder, however, that if Ann Coulter got her way and someone did put rat poison in Justice Steven's creme brulee, giving Dick Cheney another chance to put a wingnut on the court to solidify their majority: would Grover Norquist stop meeting with his fellow travelors every Wednesday since he organized the fight against Hillary Clinton's health care proposals back in '92? Unlikely. Will Fox News stop its demagoguery? Hardly. Will Rush Limbaugh retire? I wish!

Certainly if they get just one more ideologue who is reliably more conservative than the appointments made by St. Ronny Raygun, Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rove and the rest of their band of criminal co-conspirators will sleep a little easier, resting comfortably with the knowledge that inconvenient obstacles to running the world the way they see fit will no longer be interrupted by quaint little things like individual liberties and the will of the people through their elected representatives in Congress.