Katrina Politics and Hillary Supporters

[Annie]

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Lauren Sokolski Weighs In
We watched a few hours of the John Roberts hearings yesterday, and you can color us wowed. The future chief justice was poised and precise, which drove Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer bonkers. Now that Roberts's testimony has ended, though, we feel sorry for those who have to keep watching, such as MSNBC's Tom Curry. In his blog for today, he reports that Sens. Ben Nelson and Mark Pryor, Democrats from Nebraska and Arkansas respectively, are leaning toward a "yes" vote. Then he gives us this bit of cotton-candy reportage, all fluff and no substance:

When we questioned another publicly undecided Democrat, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., she said "I'm going to wait until the hearings are totally over."

I asked her if she was going to read the hearing transcript.

"I'm reading some transcript and reading some very detailed reports of the questioning but it's not over, so I'm going to wait until it is," she replied.

What criteria will you use to decide?" I asked her.

"I will announce that when I make my decision," she said.

She, like the other 99 senators, will decide Roberts's fate in the final week of September. Then we'll know where all 100 stand.

Actually, Sen. Clinton's vote is very easy to predict: She will vote whichever way the majority of Democrats do. Scroll down to Curry's 11:57 a.m. entry, and you see he was even more desperate for material:

Lauren Sokolski, from Silver Spring, Md., was here in the hearing room to witness today's testimony this morning. During a break in the action she gave me her views on the Supreme Court and the nation.

Sokolski, who opposes Roberts, worked during the Clinton administration as a volunteer. I mentioned to her that her two senators, Democrats Barbara Mikulski and Paul Sarbanes, seem likely to vote "no" on Roberts, given how they have voted on other Bush conservative judicial nominees. If that turns out to be the case, then her views will be represented.

But, she told me, "Democracy is not working for me, because (the late chief justice William) Rehnquist decided Bush should be president (by his vote in the 2000 Bush v Gore case) and Rehnquist was first put on the court by Nixon--who subsequently resigned. I find the whole thing very ironic."

Since Bush's election in 2000, she said, "we live in fear of the government, because the government decides what the threat is. I strongly believe 9/11 would not have happened if Bush hadn't been president."

Later, as we chatted about Rehnquist, she added, "I like to think he died of guilt--for what he did to this country."

Maybe tomorrow Curry can score an interview with singer/songwriter Burt Bacharach, who, according to ContactMusic.com, "has attacked US President GEORGE W BUSH for his handling of the Hurricane Katrina rescue operation":

Bacharach, 77, recalls reading newspaper articles months before the hurricane, warning "that (New Orleans) would be engulfed, that people would drown, that bodies would be floating down the road.

"Instead of pushing the funding up, they took most of it away to fight this stupid war, and that's unforgivable.

"I think Bush is just about the poorest president we've ever had. You'd have to go back before I was born to find a worse one."

The genius of American democracy is that Lauren Sokolski and Burt Bacharach are able to vote, just like the rest of us, and yet somehow the system works.