The retiring Justice Stephens was “the leader of the liberal bloc” on the Supreme Court.” He was not as leftist as Judge Souter but he got more done for the liberal agenda.

The one argument Republicans used for holding your nose and voting for a moderate was that otherwise a Democrat would appoint Supreme Court justices. Ford named Stephens, Bush Senior named Souter.

They STILL use that argument.

In the nineties the Senate was fifty Democrats and fifty Republicans. This left the deciding vote to the Vice President, who was Republican. Republicans announced this was unprecedented so they would have to compromise. The media had said so.

In 1953, the newly elected Senate was 48 Republicans and forty eight Democrats. Vice President Nixon, as per his constitutional role, cast the deciding vote. The Committee Chairs all went to Republicans and they got one extra member on each committee, which was traditionally what the bare-majority party always got.

No one pointed this out. The Leadership wanted to compromise. The 1953 precedent was never mentioned, including on Fox and in National Review.

Which gives you an idea of what John Ashbrook and I did on Capitol Hill. If we had been there, this would have been in the Congressional record.

The Martin Luther King Memorial Day had been on hold for over a decade when John died in 1982. Oddly enough, it was passed within months of his murder, er, accidental death.

Our “friends” never recognized what we did. Our enemies did, though.

The Mottl Amendment, sponsored by a Cleveland Democrat, was to restrict busing. The biggest newspaper in the state, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wanted an op-ed on it from John. He turned it over to me.

The opposition position was that the Court was the Constitution. They stood by the Constitution, though they were not FOR busing, since Cleveland was the state’s Democratic stronghold and it was a crisis center for busing.

My article was called : “The Mottl Amendment, Is There a Balance of Powers?”

I simply pointed out that there were THREE Branches of Government and each was supposed to balance the other. If congress could not limit the power of the Supreme Court, as required in Article III, it was supreme.

The Mottl Amendment was stopped by the Leadership, but the point gave John a major boost in his election campaign against Metzenbaum. He had no real opposition in the primary, and a head-to-head poll showed him ahead of Metzenbaum for the general election.

Then he died. I went to his funeral, but he didn’t. The police were holding his body for more examination.

Sonny Bono was also in the Senate primary and he was pulling ahead of the Democrat. Then he went out skiing alone at two in the morning and killed himself hitting a tree. Kopechne never had an autopsy.
No one noticed the stuff we did so no one believes that the left would go “that far.”

We stopped things before they happened, and the media never talked about them.

And do you think conservatives would mention it. They managed to keep 1953 a secret.