Yesterday was the last day for effective “Sunday Show campaigning” prior to the Iowa Caucuses. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney used the day to appear with Chris Wallace in a wide-ranging interview on the Fox that left most observers impressed and his momentum from Thursday night’s debate intact.
“Hitting it out of the park,” tweeted former GE CEO Jack Welch of Romney’s performance, which is exactly the sort of walk-off review you like to bank heading into a two-week near-hiatus from the campaign as the country celebrates Christmas and New Year’s.
Pocketing endorsements from South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley and the Des Moines Register as well as National Review and, of course, The Washington Examiner, Romney is closing out 2011 with a well-executed plan unfolding on time and in right sequence.
Newt Gingrich by contrast had a terrible week from which to recover, and, as has been typical for the former speaker of the House, he chose to try to do so via the proverbial long ball, an attack on the federal courts that is breathtaking for its scale and specificity.
Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had suggested a similar approach to the federal courts on my radio show when on Dec. 8 the topic of courts came up.
“You need someone who is willing to take on the courts directly,” Santorum opined. “I’ve said the Ninth Circuit, which you know well, very well out there, is a rogue court.”
“It is an embarrassment,” he added, “and I have called for the abolishment of the Ninth Circuit, getting rid of all the judges on the Ninth Circuit and reconstituting two new circuits out there.
“[W]e can send a very clear message that if you are a circuit that goes rogue and is overturned routinely at the United States Supreme Court, then we can do what the Constitution allows us to do, which is we can create courts, and we can also eliminate courts.”
I told the senator then that I thought this was a radical proposal, and I think Gingrich’s latest broadsides against the federal judiciary even more radical still.
Judicial review has been a fixture of the constitutional system since 1803, but the former speaker’s rhetorical assault on the Court on “Face the Nation” yesterday was without question the most radical of any in the modern era, including FDR’s Court-packing plan.
“You’ve had a fundamental assault on our liberties by the courts, you have an increasingly arrogant judiciary, and the question is, is there anything we the American people can do?” Gingrich said to Bob Schieffer.
“The standard conservative answer has been, well, eventually we’ll appoint good judges,” Gingrich added. “I think that’s inadequate.”
It isn’t inadequate. Quite apart from it being the only genuinely conservative approach to the huge problem of unfettered and often-irresponsibly judicial power, it is also the only approach with a snowball’s chance in Hell of ever actually happening, and to get to that solution, we need to elect a Republican president with 60 votes in the Senate or at least a majority of GOP senators with the resolution necessary to break the judicial filibuster via the “Constitutional option.”
The all-out assault on the federal courts that has marked the former speaker’s last few days on the trail threatens to damage the very legitimate issue of judicial usurpation of authority from the elected branches.
Proposing too radical a set of measures averts scrutiny from the courts’ abuses and obscures the remedies at hand, the necessary adoption of which should be at the center of the 2012 campaign.
With vacancies almost certainly looming on the Supreme Court, the GOP needs a nominee who can win supported by GOP Senate victories in Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
