The great nightmare is here, although the interruption of our sleep came in an unexpected way. Progressive types have been telling us for years that even if the Bush crowd can’t hurt us too bad any other way, the nightmare comes when Dub starts appointing people to the Supreme Court. O’Conner’s decision to quit now has been portrayed as surprising, what with Rehnquist practically being carried to and from the Court’s business for the past few months, and Stevens just being so old that everyone assumes he’ll quit.

People don’t usually quit the Supreme Court. The people who take that job commit to it for life not just because it says so in the Constitution, but because they regard it as the only form of recreation they’ll ever need or want. One of the qualifications for Supreme Court Justice is that you have nothing else you’d especially care to do. I don’t think those people even play golf or go fishing. They just adjudicate until they die.

O’Conner’s departure has the mainstream media talking about how the court is losing one of its moderate influences. I suppose that’s true in relative terms, but calling Sandra O’Conner a moderate judge is like calling your Camry a hot rod. O’Conner was appointed by Ronald Reagan who was resolute in his desire to have conservative judges, but she fell out of favor with the Bush crowd because "conservative" means something quite different to those folks than it meant to the Reagan crowd. O’Conner has been quite consistent in her support of states rights. Like Reagan, she doesn’t think the feds have much business messing with whatever the individual states want to do on most issues.

The Bush crowd passes itself off as conservative, but it depends on the issue. Conservatives used to believe the feds should leave the states alone, but Bush style conservatives believe the feds should bully the states on "conservative" issues like abortion. The Bush crowd is glad to be rid of O’Conner because she wouldn’t roll over on Roe v. Wade. She might not be personally in favor of abortion, but she’s not holy enough to tell anyone else what to do about it. It’s not really that simple, of course, but in the political dance that leads to the appointment and confirmation of her replacement on the court, it’s going to look very much like abortion is the litmus test. Bush may not have shaken anyone’s hand on the deal, but he has at least an unspoken pact with his constituency never to appoint anyone to the Supreme Court who isn’t willing to make aborting a pregnancy a federal crime.

Abortion isn’t the whole game; it isn’t even a big part of the game, but it’s kind of like one of those "support our troops" ribbons on the back of someone’s car. If you’ve got that, you’ve got automatic answers on a long list of other issues from local development to international capitalist imperialism. Show me a judge who’s willing to shoot down Roe v. Wade, and I’ll show you a judge who’s willing to tap your phone lines, put a surveillance camera where you work, make you pee in a bottle and throw a journalist in jail for writing about it. I’ll show you a judge who’s willing to let corporations rip you off at will and, even scarier, shoot down anyone in the world who gets in the way of that ripoff.

So although the Bushwhacker probably will get a couple more cracks at appointing Supremes before he’s through, this one will be fun to watch for those who regard Washington politics as a spectator sport. If a wise appointment is made, one which Democrats can’t possibly oppose, it won’t be much of a show, but that isn’t likely to happen. The Bolton appointment shows that the people who are pulling Bush’s strings don’t have the slightest interest in what might appease any Democrats. If he were still alive, they might nominate John Wayne to the Court. I look for an appointment which will inspire the Democrats to raise a big stink and put up a big fight, which they will inevitably lose, but the politics could get a little complicated.

Worst case: Bush nominates some flagrant anti-abortion, anti-environment war mongering right winger and the flacid Democrats can’t mount any defense. That opens the door for a couple more similar appointments to succeed in the Senate before Dub packs his furniture and his paper out of the White House. But there are some other possible scenarios. What happens, for example, if Carl Rove has to eat the consequences for outing a CIA agent just for political retribution. Dub might duck that bullet, but when he has to run his top advisor through the shredder, it’ll give the Democrats in the Senate a lot more leverage on deciding who sits on the top court. There might even be a couple of donkeys in the Senate who can figure out how to use that kind of political clout.

Even better, what if the Democrats actually figure out what the Downing Street memos mean? Impeachment probably isn’t an option at this late date, but the donkeys can win a couple of pots if they only know how to play an ace when its dealt to them. If that big right wing lie about how liberals dominate the media actually were true, the Bushwhacker wouldn’t be able to get an order for a pizza through Congress right now. I’ve been saying all along, that even if they covered their tracks on how they got elected, these guys have tremendous potential to step in their own droppings. It won’t be because of the zipper action they pinned on Clinton, because these guys aren’t getting any of that. They get off on the dollar signs, and the money’s on the table now. If the donkeys have enough hair to raise the bet, the elephants will fold like Monica’s blue dress at the dry cleaners’.

Even if Bush gets away with putting two or three crackers on the Court, don’t get too worked up about it. This too shall pass. What can they do? Make it harder to get an abortion? Put the cops in your bedroom? Turn the public schools into farm teams for state prison? Yeah, they can do all that and worse, but even the Supreme Court can’t hurt you any worse than you want to be hurt. This democracy thing that the US is selling used to be about people going to the polls. Ballot booths are almost irrelevant now. Public opinion is transmitted electronically as fast as a phone call, and even the people who don’t get to vote still get at least one phone call. The Bush crowd is a bunch of big bullies, but that’s not all they have in common with dinosaurs.