Threats and Presidential Power

The looming fight over President Bush’s Supreme Court nominee slowly begins to simmer. The various constituencies are staking out their turf. One of the more vocal factions has been right-wing cultural, and especially Christian, conservatives. Without laying out actual implications, it seems as if every article from every newspaper and magazine and every post from the most learned blogs deeply implies a threat to President Bush from his right-wing flank if he does not do their bidding. But what is that threat?

There is one scene from Oliver Stone’s otherwise unremarkable biopic “Nixon” that keeps coming back to me. I cannot remember precise details, but a character played by Larry Hagman is an ardent conservative politico who played a part in Nixon’s ascension to power (hey, no one ever said Stone actually gave much fealty to facts) and sometime after Nixon is in office, he has some demands. It is at that point that Nixon reminds the Hagman character that he is the President now, and that Hagman’s power over him faded long ago, if it ever existed, and that he would not be threatened. Some of you may remember the details better than I – as a general rule, I don’t tend to re-see the bulk of Stone’s movies. However fictive, it was a remarkable depiction of power at its highest levels.

In any case, that little portrait of power comes back to me now. Conservatives darkly hint that bad things will happen if their needs are not met. What, precisely, are those things? The President cannot run for office again. He does not have a successor lined up against whom the conservatives can rally. Next year is an election year, and so the House and Senate are going to be up for grabs anyway and I doubt that the far right will be any more or less mobilized than they have been in recent years. So what effect can conservatives have, what chips can they call in, that will hurt the president? I just do not see it. The threats seem empty – far emptier than the warnings of a long, drawn-out fight that might or might not involve a potential filibuster. And something tells me this far more plausible scenario is also not keeping the president up at night.

President Bush may be inclined to go with an arch-conservative who will appease the voices from the right. But if he does so, my sense is that it will be because that is what he wants. As he has always said, his models for a Supreme Court Justice are Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. I doubt highly that the President is going to be cowed by empty threats from a right wing flank that does not really have anywhere else to go, and that cannot do President Bush any harm even if they try do so. If the President chooses to go with his friend and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales we might get to see what the bluster from the far right actually means. Seeing them overplay their hand might be telling. It sure might be entertaining. But I doubt highly that it will have a profound impact on the final three years of the Bush administration.