ONCE MORE, JUSTICE THOMAS: OUR DUTY "PRAY, & FIGHT"

.... This is a good fight. It's a particularly good fight because it forcesMDBR liberals like me to confront a reality we don't want to confront, which is that we're depending on the least democratic institution, with small `d', in government (the courts) to win what we are no longer able to win out there in the electorate. And this is frankly devastating in its long-run implications ... It's a great political fight, it's one the Democrats are going to lose ...

Former Carter administration official, now liberal commentator Hodding Carter, on ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley", July 5, 1987.

Good old Hodding Carter, commenting on that week's news, was wrong on his specific forecast of the outcome of Robert Bork's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. (President Reagan's nominee lost.) Four years later, liberals have just finished demonstrating to a transfixed national audience that they still don't get it.

Seating at Capitol Hill committee hearings is by seniority. But how much would the Republican National Committee have paid to have all America watching as Teddy Kennedy sat at the right hand of Chairman Biden during last weekend's 72-hour inquisition? (Did you hear the one that goes, "When Ted Kennedy expelled from Harvard for cheating sits next to Joe Biden caught plagiarizing speeches of the leader of the British Labor Party which one copies off the other's notes?")

Still, Hodding Carter was correct (it's even more true today), and he agreed with Judge Bork, in spilling the liberal beans, as Carter made his far more important point. The larger truth is this: The American Left the Biden-Kennedy-Metzenbaum wing of the Democratic Party has become profoundly anti-democratic during its uninterrupted string of national defeats stretching back to 1968.

Hodding Carter flat-out admitted that these defeats have forced the Left to rely on our most undemocratic institution, the federal courts, to enact (Robert Bork's words) "a moral agenda of their own that cannot be found in the constitution and that no legislature will enact." (For reference and documentation, see Judge Bork's book, "The Tempting of America.")

This, then, is why an increasingly bitter and frustrated Left fights so hard over Supreme Court nominations. They want courts to act as legislatures: expanding the rights of criminals, hamstringing police, taking over school systems, enacting tax increases, setting the deranged loose as the new "homeless", and so on, ad nauseum. Unable to elect presidents who will make such appointments, they practice Howard Metzenbaum's politics of personal ruin where, as Clarence Thomas and a horrified nation discovered anything goes in the unsubstantiated sleaze department.

"It is a man's entire duty," wrote Stonewall Jackson, the legendary Confederate commander, "to pray and fight." Good advice, for the ages.

Friday evening (October 11), after adjournment of some of the most remarkable televised hearings Americans will ever see, Sen. Orrin Hatch was interviewed on one of the networks. Hatch was defending Thomas, when some network cretin asked him whether he thought it was all over for the President's man.

Senator Hatch offered a brief response. His words inspired millions of ordinary Americans who know what they see with their own eyes, but who care nothing for the the thinly disguised editorializing of such as Andrea Mitchell (NBC), or Dan Blather (CBS), or Peter Jennings (the high school dropout at ABC). Sen. Hatch said this:

"There are prayer groups for Clarence Thomas going on all over this town, and all over America," Hatch responded. "We'll have a lot more to say about Miss Hill tomorrow."

Most Americans pay scant or periodic attention to government and politics. But they recognize a "high-tech lynching" of a decent man when they see one. Clarence Thomas's characterization of the squalid committee hearings as such would not have resonated in Middle America, were that not what we knew ourselves to be witnessing. This is what made America's reaction to this unforgettable episode so gratifying, so historic.

By Tuesday's fateful vote, network commentators reminded a nation supporting Thomas by landslide proportions that his was the thinnest confirmation margin in more than a century (52-48). I say he's the first Supreme Court Justice in history to be confirmed with a national mandate from the people.

Betty Friedan, Kate Michelman, Molly Yard, Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem call your NOW office. You do indeed see light at the end of your tunnel but as the Country & Western song says, "... it's a train."

And for President Bush and the gentlemen of impeccable pedigree he employs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the lesson is clear:

Fight back. Stop splitting the difference. Draw clear distinctions. Lose the congressional vote if you have to, then take your persuasive case to the people who've been voting conservative since '68. When you do, not only is the opposition frozen, but the American people will respond. And no amount of liberal/congressional/media whining and handwringing will make the slightest difference.