dirty
EOG Master
[FONT=arial,helvetica]Jerrome Zeifman[/FONT]
Special to NewsMax.com
[FONT=arial,helvetica]In my view (as a Democrat and former chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee), Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., has disgraced himself and our party by misusing his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to achieve self-serving partisan ends. Special to NewsMax.com
Kennedy was the architect of an unprecedented tactic: using filibusters to polarize the Senate along party lines thus denying the confirmation of qualified conservative judges. In Bush's first term the Senate Democrats used that tactic successfully against at least 10 nominees for judgeships on circuit courts.
Fortunately, Kennedy has failed in his partisan attempt to deny Judge Alito a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
[Editor's Note: Get the bestselling book about Ted Kennedy's hypocrisy everyone is talking about -- Click Here.]
This occurred largely because Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska formed a non-partisan coalition of seven Democrats and seven Republicans to oppose filibusters, except in extraordinary cases.
Filibusters first arose after the Civil War as a means of defeating legislation intended to foster desegregation. They were an anathema to those of us who joined Martin Luther King's famous March on Washington in 1963.
Fifteen years later during the Clinton administration filibusters were presumably also abhorrent to Senator Kennedy, who then wanted to outlaw them entirely. On Jan. 28, 1998, he argued: " The president and the Senate do not always agree [on judicial nominations]. But we should resolve these disagreements by voting 'yes' or 'no.'" Three years later Kennedy put politics above principle and became a champion of the filibuster. He also threatened to boycott any work of the Senate that was not essential for national security if a Republican majority was trying to outlaw filibusters by amending the Senate rules.
Subsequently, in a badgering cross-examination of Judge Alito, Kennedy tried to portray him as an undercover enemy of equal rights for women and minorities.
For me, Kennedy's effort to impugn Judge Alito's integrity was reminiscent of Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, who tarred his victims with the brush of guilt by association. Kennedy's charge against Alito was based on the fact that 34 years ago, while a reserve officer in the Army, he joined a Princeton alumni group that opposed the banning of ROTC programs from the university's campus. Some members of the group (other than Alito) wanted Princeton to continue its traditional policy of denying admission to women.
They also opposed affirmative action programs based on quotas. (Quota-bases programs were subsequently prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court.)
On Jan. 17, NewsMax reported a story that most of the liberal media ignored: Kennedy had admitted his own membership in the Owl Club, which does not allow women, and was banned from the Harvard campus. He had paid dues to the all-male club ever since his student days. Faced with evidence of his hypocrisy, Kennedy said, "I am going to get out of it as fast as I can."
Aside from the Senator's association with an all-male club there is other more substantial evidence of flaws in Kennedy's character: Kennedy had been expelled from Harvard for paying a friend to take a Spanish exam for him.
He also has a history of mistreating women. In July 1969, with Mary Jo Kopechne (his date for the night at a drinking party) beside him in his car, Kennedy drove off the side of a bridge on Cape Cod at Chappaquiddick on Cape Cod.
When the car began to submerge in water the Senator escaped. Mary Jo remained in the car and drowned.
At that time Joan Kennedy, the Senator's wife, was pregnant. Traumatized by the scandal and by her husband's philandering, she had a miscarriage. She then started to drink her way into alcoholism. Eventually she went into psychiatric treatment and divorced Kennedy.
To counter the bad reputation he acquired among women because of the Chappaquiddick scandal and his mistreatment of his wife, the Senator pandered to pro-choice feminists ? causing his pro-life detractor to quip, "Libertine men always favor abortion."
At the Senate's confirmation hearings Kennedy metaphorically picked up the pro-abortion gauntlet and hoped to deliver Judge Alito's head on a political platter to Washington's most radical feminist groups and other major contributors of campaign money to the Democratic Party.
Finally, anyone interested in the flaws in Kennedy's character should read "The Senator: My Ten Years With Ted Kennedy," by Richard Burke. The author describes how he tried to save the Senator from his personal excesses.
He also provides a behind-the-scenes account of Kennedy's 1980 unsuccessful primary race against then President Jimmy Carter; which hopelessly polarized the Democratic Party - and helped Ronald Reagan move into the White House.
During my own career on Capitol Hill I once told House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill in confidence: "I have a low opinion of Senator Kennedy." He replied discreetly: "The Kennedys are not real Democrats. They have their own party."
[Editor's Note: Get the bestselling book about Ted Kennedy's hypocrisy everyone is talking about -- Click Here.]
Jerry Zeifman is former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee and a lifelong Democrat. He is also author of "Without Honor: Crimes of Camelot and the Impeachment of President Nixon." He is currently hoping to publish "The Dissident Democrat: a Political Memoir." [/FONT]