Heritage Foundation

I'm guessing that if, say, the Washington Post teamed up with a progressive group to create a new website called TheLiberals.com, right-wing activists and media critics would have a complete meltdown.

I'm likewise guessing that we will see no such meltdown about this:

Conservatives and citizen journalists have a new interactive community destination that showcases breaking news, opinion and culture with stunning technology, patriotic layout and ideological muscle.

TheConservatives.com -- a joint online media venture from The Washington Times and the Heritage Foundation -- is a tool to "reinvent the right" and steer the public discourse. It is up and running as of Tuesday and geared to those who are not content to sit on the sidelines.

"TheConservatives.com creates a cutting-edge new marriage between the social publishing world of bloggers and the social networking world of Twitter, Facebook and the like. Most opinion sites today enable thought-leaders to talk down to the masses. But TheConservatives.com empowers users to change the direction of that dialogue, allowing the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers, like Newt Gingrich," said John Solomon, executive editor and vice president for content of The Times.

"It is convenient. It is groundbreaking. And we believe it will transform grass-roots communications, enabling a two-way dialogue. The best ideas can grow up from the netroots, reaching like-minded opinion leaders. It is a technology and a concept that can be adapted by thinkers on the right, the left and the center," Mr. Solomon said.

Back when George W. Bush was seeking confirmation for his Supreme Court nominees, there was a group of right-wing Washington insiders known as the "four horsemen" who were at the center of this effort:

The calls start just after 8 every morning, and the participants phone in from just about anywhere. A lawyer speed dials the teleconference line from a taxi as he dashes to a breakfast meeting. A radio evangelist checks in before heading to Atlanta. An old Reagan hand punches in the password from a hotel room while a federalist movement leader calls from his office near the White House.

The daily conference call, in many ways, is indistinguishable from thousands of others occurring inside Washington's beltway, but with one big difference: This one is shaping the Republicans' nomination strategy for the Supreme Court and, in consultation with the White House, scripting party-line talking points. The daily call is also the glue for a fragile conservative coalition, from the religious right to the business lobby, that's smoothing the way for President Bush's nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

The men, who have been dialing in since 2003, have come to be known as the "Four Horsemen": C. Boyden Gray, Edwin Meese III, Jay Sekulow, and Leonard Leo. Hand-picked by the White House for their ties to disparate conservative groups, they have been instrumental in helping the president name strict constitutionalists to the federal bench--and now they hope to do the same on the nation's highest court. "We've been waiting for this for four years," says Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice. And so the Four Horsemen are galloping into this confirmation fight.

This time around, with a Democrat in the White House and Sonia Sotomayor nominated to the Supreme Court, most of these horsemen have been nowhere to be seen.  While Sekulow remains engaged in the process, both Leo and Gray have been relatively absent, though they have spoken out on occasion, while Meese had been seemingly AWOL entirely. 

Or so we thought until we saw this:

Ed Meese is at it again.

The Reagan-era attorney general, beloved by conservatives but long reviled by many liberals, is playing an important behind-the-scenes role in coordinating opposition to Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor.

From his perch at the conservative Heritage Foundation, the 77-year-old Edwin Meese III has been meeting with a network of right-of-center lawyers, buttonholing Republican senators and preaching the same message he’s been delivering since the 1980s: judges should follow the Constitution and not push a liberal agenda from the bench.

“He’s been very influential in his meetings on Capitol Hill and behind-the-scenes working with leading legal lights,’’ said Gary Marx, executive director of the Judicial Confirmation Network, which has been echoing Meese’s message with regular public blasts against Sotomayor.

“All of us feel like we stand on the shoulders of giants who have come before us, and clearly Meese is one of those giants and a conservative icon,’’ Marx added.

Interestingly, we've read lots of coverage about the Right's efforts to coordinate its opposition to Sotomayor but have never even so much as seen Meese's name mentioned very often.  Frankly, that is not surprising because presumably the Right doesn't really want its anti-Sotomayor efforts to be too compromised by knowledge that the man who played in central role in nominating Robert Bork to the Supreme Court is now playing a similar role in opposing Sotomayor.

World Magazine has a good article on President Obama and the issue of judicial nominations ... and by "good" I mean an exhaustive listing of all of the complaints and concerns Republicans and right-wing judicial activists have about the process and the future of the judiciary:

Conservatives say Obama missed an opportunity to usher in a more conciliatory start to the often contentious judicial nominating process by naming [David] Hamilton ... In nominating Hamilton, Obama ignored a letter from all 42 Republican senators, asking the president to get the process off to a bipartisan start by renominating several of President George W. Bush's blocked nominees. Bush renominated two of President Bill Clinton's stalled choices soon after taking office ... GOP senators had also hoped to use the "blue slip" tradition, which holds that no judicial nominee can come before the Senate without agreement (in the form of a blue slip) from both senators representing that nominee's state. Republicans have at least one senator in 27 states. But the two GOP senators from Texas are already losing a battle to hold onto this privilege as the White House recently signaled its intention to include that state's 12 House Democrats in the screening process.

So it was Obama who missed the opportunity to be conciliatory by not nominating rather than, say, all the Republicans in the Senate who had pre-emptively threatened to filibuster all of Obama's judicial nominees? Nice try.

Furthermore, Obama did not "ignore" their letter - in fact, he obviously took into consideration their demand that the White House "consult with us as it considers possible nominations to the federal courts from our states" because he obviously did so with Republican Senator Richard Lugar, who immediately praised the nomination:

"I enthusiastically support the Senate confirmation of David Hamilton for U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Hamilton has served the Southern District of Indiana with distinction as U.S. District Court Judge," U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar said.

Thirdly, how exactly are the Republican Senators from Texas "losing the battle" to use the "blue slip"?  As we pointed out before, in situations where the President is of one party and both of a state's Senators are from the other, tradition has generally dictated that opposing party Senators play a secondary role in the judicial nomination selection process - and that is what is happening in Texas. If they don't like Obama's nominees, they are still free to refuse to return their blue slips, so in no way can it be said that they at risk of losing this privilege.

In essence, as the article explains, all of these sorts of gripes are aimed primarily at ginning up opposition to Obama's judicial nominees in order to set the stage for a Supreme Court battle and rally Republican forces leading into the mid-term elections:

The ultimate hope among conservative lawmakers is that if Obama overreaches in his judicial picks, then Democrats may face a backlash in the polls during the 2010 Senate races. Such political costs could force Obama to make marginally more moderate picks in future openings, says Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The article features quotes from a variety of right-wing groups that work on the issue, including Whelan, as well as representatives of the Alliance Defense Fund, Judicial Watch, the Committee for Justice, and the Heritage Foundation ... so if you are looking for a good run-down of just about every right-wing talking point on the judiciary and judicial nominees, this article offers one-stop shopping.

Apparently, tomorrow the Eagle Forum and RADAR [Respecting Accuracy in Domestic Abuse Reporting] are co-hosting an all-day event entitled “The Conflict between Federal Domestic Violence Policies and Traditional Family Values” [PDF] at The Heritage Foundation that will focus on how to do away with the Violence Against Women Act: . 

The Violence Against Women Act, which now costs the federal government $1 billion a year, has spawned an industry that undermines Constitutional protections, thwarts welfare reform, weakens military readiness, fosters immigration fraud, and is harmful to families. This conference will probe how to rein in a federal law that increasingly encroaches on the personal lives of millions of Americans.

Just check out the forum’s agenda:

9:30
Feminist Fatherphobia and Domestic Violence
Phyllis Schlafly – Eagle Forum

10:00
How Marriage Protects Against Domestic Violence
Robert Rector – Heritage

10:45
How Domestic Violence Policies Weaken Families and Harm Children
Stephen Baskerville, PhD – Patrick Henry College
Foundation

11:15
VAWA: Victimizing All Taxpayers Act?
Benjamin Foster, PhD, CPA – University of Louisville College of Business

11:45
Impact on Military Readiness
Elaine Donnelly – Center for Military Readiness

It’s easy to understand that “marriage protects against domestic violence” provided that you share Schlafly’s view that wives cannot be raped by their husbands.