Republicans often talk a good line on affirmative action that almost, just almost, has me fooled. They talk about how race should not be brought into discussion when examining a person's credentials, only their professional record. This sounds sensible enough, but every now and then something pops up that shows they really don't think in such laudable terms. Two fantastic examples of racial doubletalk are former-Senate Minority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., and Gov. Sonny Perdue, R-Ga., whose campaign was based around bringing back the confederate flag. Another is the recent controversy over judicial nominee Miguel Estrada.
The short version of it is that sooner or later the Democratic minority in the Senate was going to be presented with an occasion to flex its filibustering muscles on the matter of judicial appointments. Republican lawyer Miguel Estrada happens to be the lucky guy on the receiving end of the first such confrontation.
Though the votes are there on the floor for his confirmation, the grand tradition of filibustering is being invoked for President Bush just as it was invoked for Presidents Clinton, the elder Bush and others before him. As always, a pretext is found for the filibuster, though for this one the pretext is a very interesting one. Senate Democrats claim they are being denied access to Mr. Estrada's record in the solicitor general's office, his only real record in law, and that to make the Senate vote in confirmation of a nominee with no access to any record is a perversion of the natural process.
How are the Republicans replying to all this, you may ask? Well, as his name implies, Estrada is Hispanic--Honduran, to be specific. As such, they have said that the Democratic senators in question are trying to keep a good Hispanic down because he does not conform to their ideological demands.
Rather than furnish the documents in question to take the wind out of their sails, they are instead making an explicit appeal to ethnicity to get his nomination passed. They have trotted out endorsements from such important legal organizations as the Hispanic Contractor's Association in lieu of actually giving us a nominee with a legal record that can be followed. The most shameless statement came from Al Cardenas, former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, when he called the effort to block Estrada on the grounds of his conservative ideology \an affront to millions of Hispanics"" around the country.
And so the case of Miguel Estrada gives us a fantastic counterpart to the line Republicans usually give us. In this case, Democrats are expected to kowtow to a judicial nominee with either a bad record or no record at all, going along on the grounds of ethnicity. While a coherent critique of affirmative action can be based on focusing on ideas and talents rather than race, the Republican defense of Estrada and their attack on the Democratic opposition, is based entirely on race.
If race is to be disregarded in these considerations, why should millions of Hispanics even care right now, provided the Democratic objection is based simply on the process of confirmation here and Estrada's philosophy? Why not just mount a defense of Estrada's competence and conservatism? It's especially ironic because Democrats didn't raise a similar objection over stonewalled Clinton judicial nominee Richard Paez nor relentlessly raise questions of anti-Semitism over the filibuster against the nomination of Abe Fortas to be Chief Justice in the 1960s. This sort of judicial racebaiting is peculiar to the Republicans.
And this is where the usual Republican line on affirmative action simply wears thin. On the one hand President Bush says he's against racial quotas, but on the other hand, he picks a major fight in an attempt to wear into a specific political demographic through some clever racial politicking. Lost in all this are the true reasons for the filibuster and simply a new appeal to race. It's becoming more and more clear that picking out Estrada was not intended to get the best possible appointee on the court but simply for political appearances of hiring more minorities. Along with Lott and Perdue, here the Republican hypocrisy just becomes too transparent.
Eric Kleefeld is a junior majoring in political science. His column runs every Thursday in The Daily Cardinal. He can be reached at eekleefeld@students.wisc.edu.
