A Concerted Effort

Two transcendent issues confront the Republican party. First the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the US. This is a position demanding objectivity-the law must be interpreted free of bias and judges can not be permitted to legislate from the bench. Judge Sotomayor fails on both counts. Trent Lott, from Mississippi, was disqualified from leadership in the US Senate because he made a remark flattering colleague Strom Thurmond on his hundredth birthday. Lott said he wished Thurmond, who had run as a segregationist for President a couple of generations before, had won. That intemperate boosting of a very old friend was enough to have Lott banished from an inherently partisan, innately subjective position of leadership. A judge is supposed to be non-partisan and is called on to leave subjective considerations at the door. Judge Sotomayor has said on the appellate court that her job was to make policy, to use her position not to interpret law but to make it. This is abuse by judicial fiat. Then her statements about a "wise Hispanic woman making decisions better than a white man" are an absolute abomination. The Drudge Report has chronicled multiple uses of this same racist phrase by Sotomayor going back until at least 1994. This was no slip of the tongue and along with her membership in La Raza, a brown separatist group that demands the return of the US southwest to Mexico, should disqualify Sotomayor from any promotion on the bench. Just imagine a white jurist inverting the remark and see if he would ever be nominated to a higher court. It is not enough for the Republicans in the Senate during the advice and consent hearings to ask a few questions or give Sotomayor a quizzical glance, they must muster real opposition and try to peal off the few Democrats it would take to thwart her lifetime appointment to our highest court. But they are, by in large, worthless political cowards who chase microphones and cameras and they won't. They would rather make Rush Limbaugh, who helped put many of them in office, a bugbear, than stop an activist racist from perverting our Constitution. The second issue of great moment is the national health care regime the Democrats are about to impose. If the Republicans can not thwart this ultimate socialist overreach, they deserve to be finished as a national party. This measure will ration care and shorten lives. Your most personal family decisions will be taken from you and your doctor and placed in the hands of bureaucrats. There is a scandal now in the Veterans' Affairs medical system including in the VA in my home state of Tennessee where colonoscopy equipment was not sterilized between patients and this not properly cleaned device spread hepatitis and HIV with at least five(5) AIDS cases attributed to this horrible negligence. This is Federal medical care, cold, impersonal, at times, dangerous, and intrusive when on a magnified scope into the general populace where your obesity, your decision to smoke, your end of life care decisions with elderly or chronically ill family members will be taken away from you and your family physician and placed in the hands of a bean counter who cares not a wit for you or your family. They will not know you and your kin, and you will be nothing more than a number, a statistic. Do you remember Terri Schiavo? If you become inconvenient, expensive, unable to speak in your own defense, without an advocate, do you want a Federal cost-benefit analysis to determine whether your life support is turned off and you are forced to starve and dehydrate to death? National health care, socialized medicine is not a buttress to the welfare of a family but a chain around your necks. Go ask a Brit or a Canadian-those with resources often come here to escape the prison of their government heath plan and use their own money to travel here and pay for fee for service medical care. If we impose a similar system, where will the rich go to find care, particularly if there are civil or criminal sanctions against people who attempt to opt out of their government health plan? This is a national nightmare about to happen and I don't believe the Republicans will squawk too much in an effort to stop it. The GOP, if it allows farcical judicial appointments and tolerates if not actually advances socialism, especially with medical care supplanting family decision making with bureaucratic interference, has outlived its usefulness. If Republicans can not block Obamaism, it is time for a third party, one that brings conservatism back into the American political mainstream, as the right and center right comprise most of the voters in the country, and they deserve a party that advances their values.