Remember how intimidating the political right used to seem? Liberals used the phrases “echo chamber” and the "message machine money matrix” to describe what to all appearances was a disciplined, vast, and efficient set of well-funded organizations and operatives promoting bad ideas and destroying good ideas and good people. But where is the great echo chamber now? The cracked-up conservative reaction to the nomination of Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court seems to rest in the hands of some isolated cranks -- “presidents” of letterhead organizations whose staffs consist of themselves and someone who books their TV appearances, like Wendy Long of the Judicial Confirmation Network, Curt Levey of the Committee for Justice, or Manuel Miranda of the Third Branch Conference. None of them, nor the better-known cranks like Newt Gingrich, seem to have gotten the memo. The memo that says, for example, you don't just jump out of the box and declare Sotomayor a “racist.” Or the memo that would have reminded Miranda that “limp-wristed” is probably not a good word to use to describe Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell if you want to persuade him to let you back into the inner circle. Or, more basically, the memo that would say, let's decide whether we have a case against this nominee, and what the case is, and then work together to build it. The Sotomayor nomination has sent the right tumbling over its shoelaces, with people who haven't been elected to anything in this millenium stepping in front of those who actually have to figure out the Republican Party's survival strategy. There's more to it than the simple fact that a supremely qualified Hispanic nominee poses a dilemma for a party that was once making inroads with Hispanic voters and needs to do so again. In my column on the mysterious crack-up of the right, in the current issue of the Prospect, I suggested that it was an “accomplishment” of the Obama administration – that the administration's approach to bipartisanship and gestures toward common-ground had effectively broken the right. If so, the Sotomayor scramble will be Exhibit A. Did the White House know exactly what it was doing? Maybe. Of course, it's not like Obama reached deep into obscure levels of the judiciary to find the one nominee who would blow up the right. Sotomayor had been at the very top of every speculative list of likely Democratic nominees to the Court long before Barack Obama even announced his candidacy, and her vetting apparently began even before the vacancy was official. But the White House is loaded with people, starting with Vice President Biden and his chief of staff Ron Klain, who understand the politics of judicial nominations perfectly. They surely understood that Sotomayor was simultaneously a safe, perfectly confirmable nominee with exceptional credentials, and also that some portion of the GOP wouldn't realize that, or wouldn't be willing to give up the opportunity to use a nomination as an attempt to pick a fight. It's not just that she's Latina, though. It's a function of a Congress in which the minority party has little room to maneuver. When Republicans try to oppose, for example, the economic stimulus package, Obama says warmly, “bring me your ideas,” and they have none, or they produce another one of their cartoon budget schemes. In other cases, they're shut out by congressional rules that don't allow a filibuster, or where they can't hold their own party together. A judicial nomination, however, offers an opportunity to oppose without proposing an alternative, and to bring in all the old culture-war tropes that don't really come up in the context of the budget. It's an opportunity they can't pass up, because nothing like it may come along again for years. But there are consequences to such reflexive opposition. So Gingrich, Long, Levey and others untied by any institutional obligations go jumping out front while those who have to think about the future are paralyzed, trying to have it both ways. The result is chaos. And it probably would have happened with just about any well-qualified nominee. -- Mark Schmitt
