Call from the Poll

Okay, here is Mojo calling his shot...

The nominee for Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court will go to J. Harvie Wilkinson.

I come by this divine little soupçon of wisdom by virtue of the fact that George Will penned the op/ed equivalent of a sloppy blow job for Judge Wilkinson in Sunday's Washington Post. I am one of those who believe that Will is part of a quasi-official information organ for the Republican Party's Mighty Wurlitzer and Maximum Leader's communications bullpen in the West Wing.

Basically, a religious textualist and orginalist who was appointed by Ronald Reagan in 1984. He got his start in Republican Party politics by running unsuccessfully for Congress in the late 60s before deciding law school might be an easier path across the Potomac.

One of his more memorable moments on the bench to date has been his authoring the now-somewhat-infamous Hamdi decision for the Fourth Circuit. To review, that's the decision that sought to justify unlimited police powers for Maximum Leader to prosecute the War on Terror® that was swatted out of the park by a 6-3 vote of the Supremes.

Yeah, I'll give you three guesses who the dissenters were...

And yet, he also authored the decision for the Fourth upholding the Clinton policy of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" regarding gays in the military.

So the big question becomes, are his conservative credentials strong enough to mollifiy the kool-aid drinking Red-Staters, or is Redneckistan going to be satisified with nothing less than the reanimated corpse of Roy Cohn on the court.

My basic instinct is that Wilkinson is the perfect stealth nominee for the court. He is a little older, he doesn't have a particularly high profile, he is known as being somewhat affable, but his writing and opinions generally fall into the Rehnquist school of conservatist activism from the bench all gussied up in a Victorian-era costume of Originalism and textualism...you know, the whole "Constitution in Exile" thing. But he hasn't done enough to create the kind of heat that will make progressives go nuclear on his nomination.

He is going to be the man, and if it's not for O'Connor's chair, then it is going to be for Rehnquist seat and Scalia or Kennedy will be moved to Chief.

mojo sends