I present to you the Alliance for Justice's press area, which is still 'under construction'.  Oh, and NARAL's home page has action items on sex ed, family planning, and 2008 candidates.  You'd think that these groups would have campaigns ready to go upon this expected announcement.  And yet, they don't.

Some people think that this ruling will be a rallying cry for the pro-choice groups to organize around.  I don't think so.  You're either a fighter or you're not.  The people that lead these groups aren't fighters.

There's more...

Right after the Alito fight, and at Jane Hamsher's urging, I wrote a piece called 'Hey PFAW, NARAL, and Alliance for Justice: This is How a Real Alito Campaign Should've Gone'. In it, I outlined the structure of what a modern campaign would have looked like.

I'm worried that we're headed for a repeat, if a vacancy on the court should open up.  A real campaign to push the courts back to mainstream values needs to happen.  Strict constructionists just legalized corporate fraud by letting banks that helped Enron's fraudulent schemes go unpunished.  The theft by elites of the public treasury and the public trust is the critical structural problem faced by this country, and it's one that the left needs to take seriously.  The internet left does take it seriously; indeed that's why we exist, sitting as the voice of one slice of the public against a corroded media system by and for insiders.  But the People for the American Way and the Alliance for Justice type organizations, I just don't see the improvement happening fast enough.

The Alito failure was a total systems meltdown.  There was never internal consensus that Alito could be beaten, or that he should be beaten.  There was never internal consensus on how to move message, what message to move, and how to persuade and/or lobby Senators.  And there was no overarching critique of a right-ward turn in the Federal judiciary, the expansion of executive privilege, or economic populism.  It was all 'Alito is bad for my issue', a soup of silliness.

The 2006 elections changed a lot of dynamics, and it moved us to 50 Senators.  This means that Bush cannot easily nominate a crazy wingnut, but he can still nominate a moderate wingnut.  And he can still put wingnuts on the courts.  But now is the moment to make the overall critique of the conservative judiciary, to push back against decisions like this.  Now is the time for the Alliance for Justice and People for the American Way to call for the impeachment of Clarence Thomas for lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee, or to call for reform of the judiciary so that the halls of justice actually stand for justice against an immoral Presidency.  The courts just legalized Wall Street defrauding the American public at a moment when economic populism is on the upswing, and yet I see no action items, and not even any press releases on this (the Alliance for Justice web site's press section has an 'under construction' message in place of content, so I can't really tell).

This is a very serious problem.I would strongly encourage donors or members of the People for the American Way, or the Alliance for Justice, to ask the organizations just why this court decision went ignored.  I want to know why there is no action item I can point to, no legislative fix to the problem, and no strategy here.  No one was fired for the Alito debacle, and it shows.  This is a big deal, and if large multi-million dollar organizations meant to defend our courts from the right wing can't get something like this, which should be a lay-up, to even be considered by the political system, then what exactly are they good for?  And since the movement is assuming that these are the groups that will kick their obviously non-existent machinery into gear to fight the next SCOTUS appointee, we should all be concerned.

UPDATE: Wow, that's timely. The Supreme Court just boosted our ability to deal with global warming by allowing the Federal government to regulate carbon emissions. Baby steps. Oh, and Alito, Roberts, Scalia, and Thomas were evil. How about a press release, PFAW or AFJ?

UPDATE AGAIN: Several of you asked for the case against Thomas. Well here he is telling the Senate Judiciary that he had no personal opinion on Roe v Wade prior to his confirmation, when he in fact had expressed such opinions on the matter. There's more, of course, including Anita Hill. The point here though is not that an impeachment campaign is a good strategy, because it might not be. I concede I'm often a bit too out there on such matters. But surely a long-term demonization strategy showing just how unethical Thomas and the other conservatives on the court are would be useful.

There's more...

This is not SOTU themed, but it's a post I've been working on about how we could have fought the Alito campaign.  I consider what happened a system failure.

The Context

Some people think that winning on Alito was always a longshot.  I don't think so.  Two stats suggest the magnitude of our failure.  One, the country thinks that Roe v Wade should be protected.  Two, the country wanted Sam Alito confirmed by the Senate.  The only way to reconcile these conflicting sentiments is that we failed to explain that Sam Alito seeks to overturn Roe versus Wade.

And though we have only 44 Senators, the political environment is very unfavorable for Bush.  He is at historically low approval ratings, and compares favorably only with the corrupt Republican Congress whose responsibility was handling the confirmation process.

Yet, with this context ripe with opportunity for a win, freeper Sam Alito is now a sitting Supreme Court Justice.  I can't help but conclude that we could have stopped him, but we did not.

If you want to know how a real campaign on Alito would've looked, here's one version of what you might have seen.

The Message

Bush and his court nominee wants to make abortion illegal.

The Political Operation

There would have been real intraparty communication, beginning immediately after Bush's reelection.  This operation would have identified key legislative staffers, officials, unions, groups, progressive journalists, funders, and online partisans, and set up regular networking sessions so people knew who was on the team.  Formal and informal meetings, conferences, and money would have been dedicated to fleshing out arguments and connecting these stakeholders to one another.  Not all stakeholders would buy in, but enough would be given the opportunity so the group would have cohesion, legitimacy, and a sense of momentum.  Surrogates would have been identified, networked, and at appropriate times, they would have been briefed.  Necessary legal organizations would have been formed to channel advertising money, and donors would have been educated on these channels.  One blog with a successful paid blogger tied into this political operation would have been picked to track the politics, media, and arguments around the Supreme Court.  The goal would be to get enough stakeholders to align their interests with each other, but not an inflexible group designed around inaction and false consensus.  Developing a sense of teamwork, and not lockstep strict agreement, would be the goal.  

Branding and Advertising

As soon as Bush nominated Alito, new ad hoc unbranded groups would have broadcast ads around the country with pictures of a coathanger hanging on a rusty nail, saying that Bush wants to make abortion illegal and take us back to the time when women died in back alleys and doctors were sent to jail for providing medical care.  There would have been a media firestorm over liberal extremists, which would generate free media.  The next ad would have been harder hitting, showing sleazy used car salesman offering abortion services.  TV networks would have refused to run these ads, generating more free media.  These groups would then leak direct mail pieces that are even harder hitting, with pictures of women barefoot and pregnant.  The advertising would have included the recent mining accident, and blamed Bush for it.  All of these tactics would have been used to generate a climate of fear around crossing the pro-choice movement.  Protests, live-site events, and cultural products would be sold around this campaign.

A Research Operation

Groups would have assembled research on every single Senator, group, and journalist involved in the process.  Alito wouldn't just be the focus on research; every single right-wing group, speaker, commenter, and pundit would have a dossier that showed that their interests leaned towards making abortion illegal.  A secondary line of attack on so-called-moderate pro-choice Republicans might have been corruption in service of Bush's agenda.  Every single day of the hearings, every single witness would be the target of mockery and derision.  There would be new polls twice a week showing support for abortion rights.

Surrogate and Media Operations

The list of surrogates having been created, surrogates would be briefed with talking points and research, and monitored.  They would be harshly criticized in the blogs if they screwed up, and media booking assets would have been removed from them.  A media critique focusing on key journalists would have been launched via the blogosphere.  This critique would weld together the institutional revulsion at the coathanger ads, bad journalism, and used boycotts and savvy opposition research to attack the purvayers of conventional wisdom.  With the political space thus created, Senators would be free to preen and lecture us about maintaining a civil bipartisan tone around not killing women in back alleys.

Online Operation

Lists of Senators and positions would be prominently displayed online, with contact information.  Waverers would be mocked mercilessly, and vicious flash cartoons would be deployed aggressively to show Bush's hatred of women's rights and preference for back-alley deaths over legalized abortion.  Oppo research would be deployed online against right-wing groups, and Senators would be confronted with a wave of constituent email.  This email would be collected and used to put Senators on the record on their positions.

Enforcement

PACs and bloggers would threaten to run primary challengers against Democratic Senators, and strong races against Republican ones.  Vicious direct mail pieces would go out, and would be sent to political consultants with the clear message that this is a political issue that candidates will run on in 2006 should their Senator clients vote the wrong way.  Meanwhile, a few key figures would have lined up support from funders to enforce discipline on wayward groups.

Leadership

None of these pieces are that hard to put together, once momentum gets going.  It happened with Social Security.  The message was simple.  Bush wants to cut your benefits.  There is no crisis.  Simple.  There were enforcement mechanisms, there was a political operation behind the whole campaign.  There was a clear political operation.  Pundits got destroyed for their bad framing.  USA Next was plastered.  The netroots were engaged, and Josh Marshall laid out the arguments.

We could have done this on Alito.  We could have won.  We did not.

There's more...