Specter flap rallies the right

In the end, Arlen Specter seems likely to take his seat as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee after all.

But it won't come without a pound of flesh. Ultimately, the two-week firestorm the moderate Pennsylvania Republican has faced since his comments on judicial nominations, made right after his reelection to the Senate, demonstrates just how emboldened the right wing of the Republican Party has become.

Not just antiabortion religious conservatives but also economic conservatives pushing for tort reform have used the Specter flap to make their message clear: With President Bush reelected and larger Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, the time has come to enact the conservative agenda.

"It reflects the lines of division in the election, and is in a sense the first skirmish in what's going to be a long war," says James Guth, a political scientist at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

Now, a chastened Senator Specter, after multiple TV appearances and closed-door meetings with senators, has put himself on record as promising to ease the way to confirmation for judicial nominations Bush sends to the committee, in spite of Specter's personal support for abortion rights.

Ironically, if Specter had not made his Nov. 3 comment, he could, theoretically, have given the Bush administration more heartache on judicial nominations than he can now. Still, it hardly seemed possible in the first place that the Arlen Specter of old - the one who opposed conservative Judge Robert Bork for the Supreme Court in 1987 - would have come back to take the chair of the gatekeeping Senate Judiciary Committee.

Bush had helped Specter win a tough Republican primary race in Pennsylvania against a conservative, and then helped him, too, in the general election. So Specter already owed the White House, and was not expected to give Bush trouble with judicial nominees. As Specter has repeated over and over since his controversial comment, he has supported every Supreme Court nominee that has come down the pike since Judge Bork, including Clarence Thomas, as well as the other federal court nominees, some of whom were bottled up by Democrat-led filibusters.

Unlike the flap two years ago over then-Senate majority leader Trent Lott's praise of onetime segregationist Strom Thurmond - which cost Senator Lott his leadership role - Specter's offending comment at least had the merit of being true.

At his postelection news conference Nov. 3, Specter said that if Bush sent up judicial nominees who favored overturning Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion, they would probably be blocked by Democrats.

"The president is well aware of what happened, when a number of his nominees were sent up, with the filibuster," Specter said. "And I would expect the president to be mindful of the considerations which I am mentioning."

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