Now:

“It’s great to be back in the state of Tennessee. I’m proud to be traveling with…Lamar Alexander.” – President Bush on Earth Day, Promoting his “Clear Skies” Initiative

Then:

Senator Lamar Alexander, a Tennessee Republican, told Senate colleagues Monday that he will not support the Bush administration’s air pollution plan – known as “Clear Skies” – because it does not “go far enough, fast enough” to solve his state’s air pollution problems. – ENS, 7/15/03

Hey, we didn’t say it. House Resources chair Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA) did.

Yesterday, while Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) was talking up the new energy bill’s hydrogen fuel subsidies at a crowded Capitol Hill news conference, Rep. Pombo turned to House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) and whispered, “This is bulls–t.” (A CNN journalist happened to be within earshot.)

Pombo later explained his comment. President Bush’s plan to spend $2 billion developing hydrogen-fueled cars is “not a short-term solution because we just don’t have the technology to produce it,” he said, adding that the promised vehicles are “multimillion-dollar prototypes that nobody’s going to buy.”

And Pombo’s actually right. Sure, hydrogen will be an important energy source down the road. But making fuel-cell technology the focus of our sustainable energy policy “means having to wait 15 to 20 years to produce cleaner cars and wean the country off of oil,” according to the National Resources Defense Council.

Our environmental problems are serious and growing now. And while President Bush trumpets the long-term gains of hydrogen, he’s actually reducing investment in clean technologies that already exist, sopping the profit-flushed fossil fuel industries with billions in subsidies, and actively opposing efforts to make today’s cars and trucks cleaner and more fuel-efficient.

And does Rep. Pombo’s whispered aside suggest some hidden enviro sensibility? Nope. When he’s not cursing out other people’s non-solutions to today’s energy problems, Pombo acts as a “key proponent of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska.”

This Sunday Senate majority leader Bill Frist (R-TN) will participate in an event called “Justice Sunday,” where he will join right-wing religious groups in a telecast denouncing progressives as “against people of faith.” In fact, a flier for the event states, “The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith.” Hundreds of religious leaders have denounced the event, writing directly to Frist and urging him “to repudiate those who misuse religious for political purposes and who impugn the faith of any who disagree with them.” Furthermore, of the hundreds of President Bush’s judicial nominations who have been confirmed, a number of those who preside over the nation’s most influential courts — the circuit courts — as well as district courts are unapologetically faithful. The list includes:

Judge Jay Bybee of the 9th Circuit Court: “a returned missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a legal scholar who has been on the fast track since he was a Hinckley scholar at Brigham Young University.” [Source]

Judge D. Brooks Smith of the 3rd Circuit Court: In 2000, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Alttona-Johnstown (PA) awarded Judge D. Brooks Smith the Prince Gallitzen. Established in 1990, the award is given to those who “exemplify in their discipleship the evangelizing characteristics of the Reverend Priest and Prince Demetrius Augustine Gallitzin. These men and women through their lives and ministry in the Church have been a light to those around them.” [Source]

Judge Richard C. Wesley of the 2nd Circuit Court: Judge Wesley has been a member of the Board of Trustees of United Church of Livonia. [Source]

Judge Roger L. Gregory of the 4th Circuit Court: A biography on Gregory wrote that his parents taught him that “hard work and a strong belief in God would help him go far.” Also, “his strong faith and deep desire to learn filled his mind with a love for the law and filled his heart with a love for people.” Furthermore, he is quoted as saying, “Fear may trouble your mind for a moment, but faith will sustain your heart for a lifetime.” [Source]

Judge Julia Smith Gibbons of the 6th Circuit Court: In her USDOJ bio, Judge Gibbons is described as “an elder at her church and a former President of the Memphis Rotary Club.” [Source]

Judge Diane S. Sykes of the 7th Circuit Court: On Feb. 20th, 2005, Sykes addressed the St. Thomas More Society after the annual Red Mass. She recalled an experience in which she told her legal colleagues, “You and I have important work to do, maintaining ethical standards” and then continued on to “advise the audience ‘not to put out the Spirit (quoting Eph:10). Against such things there is no law. There is the Holy Spirit in our lives.’” [Source]

District Judge J. Leon Holmes: “In a 2002 address to the Society of Catholic Social Scientists in Ann Arbor, Mich., Holmes questioned the legitimacy of church-state separation, noting that ‘we are left with some unease about this notion that Christianity and the political order should be assigned to separate spheres.’ He went on to observe that ‘Christianity transcends the political order and cannot be subordinated to the political order.’ Suggesting that eventually religion and government would be one he said ‘the final reunion of Church and state will take place at the end of time, when Christ will claim definitive political power of all creation, inaugurating an entirely new society based on the supernatural.’” [Source]

Bill Frist, 3/3/05:

[W]e must harness the power of the market and give younger Americans the choice of personal retirement accounts whose rate of growth, and ultimately rate of benefits, will grow faster than traditional Social Security.

Chattanooga Times Free Press, 4/20/05:

The campaign committee of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., lost more than $16,000 in the stock market in the first three months of the year, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The committee also needs an infusion of $60,000 to cover the outstanding balance on a U.S. Bank loan, records show.

ABCNews7 in Chicago interviewed Henry Hyde (R-IL):

Republican Congressman Henry Hyde made some surprising comments Thursday on the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton. He now says Republicans may have gone after Clinton to retaliate for the impeachment of Richard Nixon.

[snip]

Andy Shaw asked Hyde if the Clinton proceedings were payback for Nixon’s impeachment.

“I can’t say it wasn’t, but I also thought that the Republican party should stand for something, and if we walked away from this, no matter how difficult, we could be accused of shirking our duty, our responsibility,” said Hyde.

The piece was available here, but is not currently online.

UPDATE 12:23PM: This piece is back on the website now, but without the quote in this blog post.

UPDATE 1:13PM: Full version – slightly revised – back up on site. ABC7 says they took the original version down while they added a footnote.

All sorts of people and parties have been blamed for the conservatives’ reckless threat to go nuclear in the Senate. But New York Times op-ed columnist David Brooks reveals that at the root of all of this is…the Roe v. Wade decision. Like a kneejerk radical conservative, he attempts to blame all our political problems on the infamous Supreme Court decision, contending that “Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.”

While you’re shaking your head in confusion, let me explain his logic: By removing the abortion issue from the legislatures, Roe “suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have.” As a result, all battles over judges are really battles over abortion – no matter what people say.

Mr. Brooks will have to excuse those of us who find it hard to believe that hard-lined conservatives feel justified in trashing a 200-year-old Senate tradition because of their belief that a single Supreme Court decision is illegitimate and must, at all costs, be overruled. The Roe decision has hardly stifled debate over the abortion issue; joined only recently by gay marriage, Roe is often all we hear when the right needs an example of “what’s wrong with our country.”
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Tom DeLay claims that all the criticism of his conduct is being orchestrated by a “left-wing syndicate.” The latest member to join the partisan chorus: Ted Olson. You’ll remember that, in 2000, Olson argued on behalf of George W. Bush before the Supreme Court. He also served as Bush’s Solicitor General until July 2004.

In Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, Olson — in a piece entitled “Hands Off Our Judiciary” — criticized a “prominent member of the leadership of the House of Representatives…[who] has characterized another justice’s approach to adjudication as ‘incredibly outrageous.’” The person he was referring to was Tom DeLay, who made that comment the day before.

Here’s Olson’s response to DeLay’s comments:

It is time to take a deep breath, step back, and inject a little perspective into the recent heated rhetoric about judges and the courts. We might start by getting a firm grip on the reality that our independent judiciary is the most respected branch of our government, and the envy of the world.

Olson also strongly criticized DeLay’s suggestion to investigate the judges who ruled in the Terri Schiavo case:

Calls to investigate judges who have made unpopular decisions are particularly misguided, and if actually pursued, would undermine the independence that is vital to the integrity of judicial systems. If a judge’s decisions are corrupt or tainted, there are lawful recourses (prosecution or impeachment); but congressional interrogations of life-tenured judges, presumably under oath, as to why a particular decision was rendered, would constitute interference with — and intimidation of — the judicial process. And there is no logical stopping point once this power is exercised.

When are left-wing partisans like Ted Olson going to put an end to their witch hunt against Tom DeLay?