Ruth Marcus' High Court Caricature pointed out McCain's straight talk express hit some problems when talking about the United States Supreme Court and the federal judges generally:
I will admit I always thought the battle cry over activist judges was overdone and hypocritical. The Rehnquist and Roberts court gladly, actively, invalidate federal laws without being called activists - but then they are on the side of the name-callers. Which is what I think is the point: activists judges are the excuse for losers with a bad case."'I disagree with Senators Clinton and Obama that federal judges should be able to legislate from the bench,' says a petition on McCain's Web site -- as if his Democratic opponents have made that outlandish claim to judicial power.
The world he sketches of liberal Judges Gone Wild is largely imaginary. The freewheeling jurisprudence of the 1960s has tempered, if not vanished. That's not surprising: Seven of the nine Supreme Court justices are Republican appointees, as are about 100 of the 166 appeals court judges.
Indeed, the supposed distinction between activist liberals and color-inside-the-constitutional-lines conservatives is not only phony but often backward. In its first 200 years, the Supreme Court struck down fewer than 130 acts of Congress; in the past 13 years, it has overturned more than 30, including a piece of McCain's signature campaign-finance law. This behavior is hardly the 'humility' McCain argues should be restored to federal courts."
Harold Meyerson's McCain's America points out that McCain is not adverse to his own nastiness when campaigning:
"What remains for the GOP is a campaign premised more on issues of national identity, aimed largely at that portion of our population for which 'American' is synonymous with 'white' and 'Christian,' than any national campaign has been since the American Party (also known as the Know Nothings) based its 1856 campaign chiefly on Protestant bigotry against Irish and German Catholic immigrants. In Appalachian America (the heart of which went to the polls yesterday in West Virginia), as Mark Schmitt notes in the forthcoming issue of the American Prospect (which I edit), a disproportionate number of people write 'American' when answering the census question on ethnic origin. For some, 'American' is a race -- white -- no less than a nationality, and it's on this equation that Republican prospects depend."Richard Cohen extends that point with his McCain in the Mud:
"The most admirable of McCain's qualities -- his life story, his integrity -- make him particularly well suited to accomplish the next president's primary task, restoring the American people's trust in their government. But ideas matter, and on the Middle East, McCain not only has little to say that is interesting but, in his swipe at Obama, a distinctly ugly way of saying it."Even as it becomes a bit tiresome, our slogan that McCain would be serving Bush's third term has truth. Not all war heroes deserve to be president.
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