The Uncompromising Mr. Bush

Bush's view of what's essential for the Republic is different. He came to office determined to retrieve the executive power he believed his predecessor had forfeited in the crucible of impeachment. This included -- and the irony here is unintentional -- reclaiming from the Senate the clear prerogative of nominating judges without undue concern about confirmation, even though it was Republicans who had dragged their feet on so many of Clinton's nominees.

"It's not easy to be nominated and then have your hearing held up for political purposes," Bush said. "These are good, decent people . . . for fairness sake, give them a vote, up or down."

If these words had a familiar ring to them, there was a reason: President Clinton used an almost identical appeal when the GOP bottled up his judicial nominees. "The Senate's failure to act on my nominations, or even to give many of my nominees a hearing, represents the worst of partisan politics," Clinton declared in a 1997 radio address. "Under the pretense of preventing so-called judicial activism, they've taken aim at the very independence our founders sought to protect."

A current Democratic senator with more than a passing interest in executive power seemed to be paving the way for her colleagues to accept some disappointment. "Usually when you have a compromise, which this was, it doesn't satisfy anybody 100 percent," Hillary Rodham Clinton told CNN's Judy Woodruff on Thursday afternoon. "And we will probably see the confirmation of people who are very extreme. And I regret that."

"Very extreme" is a phrase that itself sounds extreme, and such language is part of a larger debate taking place about whether Americans are really as divided as all that. Sen. Clinton, like most Democrats, is counting on the notion that Americans are generally mainstream and want their judges to be mainstream. So she's suggesting that Bush is nudging the judiciary to the right of that. For his part, the president won reelection after a campaign in which he vowed at every stop to appoint federal judges "who know the difference between personal opinion and the strict interpretation of the law." This was tantamount to a promise to the voters he counted on most, those who are conservative on cultural issues and who are opposed to abortion.

Judicial activism -- of both the liberal and conservative varieties -- is where today's deadlocked politics meets the "culture wars." For that reason, it's inevitable that Bush would accede to the desires of his conservative base (and his own beliefs) when appointing federal judges. This is one clear way to leave a legacy for the people who share his social values -- and who voted for him and his party.

Bush's critics want him to show more deference to the Senate as an institution, and to heed the compromise forged by that bipartisan group of largely centrist senators. But that's not where Bush's head is. His father served in the House, and his grandfather in the Senate, but the 43rd president, our first MBA to hold office, is a child of the executive suite in temperament and training. The Senate's traditions are someone else's concern -- the province of Byrd perhaps, or maybe John McCain, Bush's nemesis from the days before 9/11. Bush sees his job as defending executive power -- and trying to populate the third branch of government, the judiciary, with reliable conservatives.

In trying to understand Bush's motivations, and his possible next moves, one other thing must be said: He does not like the way Democrats talk about his nominees. The president has a personal relationship with some of his appointees, and he's met with the families of nearly all of them.

Bush is not pleased that Democrats have already derailed his ambition to appoint the first Latino, Miguel Estrada, to the Supreme Court by rejecting Estrada for an appeals court post. Bush believed it was deliberate character assassination when Democrats derailed Charles W. Pickering Sr. on charges of being racially insensitive; he got fighting mad when Priscilla Owen, a Texas homegirl, was characterized as "an extremist"; and the president was personally offended when Brett Kavanaugh, another of his nominees to the federal appellate bench, was denounced by People for the American Way as a "partisan ideologue" who is "unfit" for the job.

Bush wasn't occupying the White House when John Ashcroft, then a Republican senator from Missouri, derailed Ronnie White, one of Bill Clinton's judicial nominees, with the ludicrous slur that White was "pro-criminal." Bush has convinced himself that Democrats shouldn't consider such history. But they do, as Bush learned when he nominated Kavanaugh, whose crime in Democrats' eyes is that he served on independent counsel Kenneth Starr's staff.

Free from the burden of historical memory, Bush can just get indignant. He wasn't in town during Starr's investigation, and he thinks he knows the gentlemanly, soft-spoken Kavanaugh a bit better than liberal judicial activist Ralph Neas does -- for the simple reason that Kavanaugh works at the White House and Bush sees him almost every day. It was Kavanaugh's wedding that Bush went to a year ago in Georgetown after giving that radio address on judicial activism and marriage; Kavanaugh married Bush's personal secretary.

To paraphrase the late House speaker Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill Jr.: These days, all politics is personal.

Author's e-mail:

carlcannon@hotmail.com

Carl Cannon covers the White House for National Journal.