New York Daily News: Richard Cohen: : "Over the weekend I went to a party, where I was asked who I thought should succeed Sandra Day O'Connor on the Supreme Court. Without hesitation I boldly gave my answer: Judge Judy.
I have no idea if Judy Sheindlin is a Republican or a Democrat, and her legal ideology is a mystery to me. I only know that she gets the job done and can, in the inimitable words of the Ultimate Judge Judy Web page, 'see through BS pretty fast.' That's the judge for me. I am (mostly) serious.
Groups on the right and on the left are reportedly prepared to spend as much as $100 million to promote or block certain nominees. Indeed, the handkerchief has already been dropped and the duel begun. The E-mails seem to arrive by the nanosecond. The alarmist letters stuff the mailbox. The interest groups act as if the vacancy on the Supreme Court belongs to them. I beg to differ. It is the United States Supreme Court and belongs to all of us.
This is emphatically not how interest groups on the right see it. They consider this seat on the court their own, recompense for their support of George W. Bush. What's more - and unmentioned for the sheer bad taste of it all - is that they feel the President owes them one in restitution for his father's boneheaded appointment of David Souter. It is Souter who haunts this nominating process. Souter was not asked his views on abortion. This will not happen again.
The upshot is that even the plenty conservative Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general and once the White House counsel, is being pummeled by religiously based right-wing groups. Based on some of his decisions when he was on the Texas Supreme Court and, more pertinent, his lack of fulsome anti-abortion rhetoric, he has been deemed unacceptable by the true leaders of this very Christian nation. It is, really, an absurdity. If he is not acceptable, then Strom Thurmond will have to be exhumed."