It shouldn’t have been news to anyone, but apparently it was: Conservative Republicans have been working for years — years! — to put right-wing ideologues on the Supreme Court. The New York Times laid out the story this morning, and John Kerry and Ted Kennedy have both seized on it as an argument for filibustering the nomination of Samuel Alito.
But there’s an elephant in the room here, and it’s one that Kennedy, at least, doesn’t seem much interested in addressing: What have the Democrats been doing while the Republicans have been scheming? Kennedy faced several variations on that question during a conference call a few minutes ago, and he never came up with much of an answer. Bruce Shapiro of the Nation asked Kennedy why Democrats didn’t have a “more comprehensive battle plan” for defeating the Alito nomination. Kennedy explained that Democrats in the Senate have mixed feelings about a filibuster now. Yes, Shapiro asked, but why didn’t the Democrats do a better job of making the case against Alito before the question of a filibuster arose? “That’s fair enough,” Kennedy said, then launched into a long non sequitur of a response that began with his brother’s nomination of Byron White in 1962 and ended with his complaint that judicial nominees are schooled not to answer substantive questions from senators anymore.
We made another run at Shapiro’s question a few minutes later, but Kennedy remained focused on the immediate issue of the filibuster. We tried one more time, and Kennedy finally gave something that sounded like an answer: The Democrats haven’t done a better job at selling opposition to Alito, he said, because they just haven’t had enough time to do so.
“I don’t want to be apologetic on it, but the Senate has basically been out,” Kennedy said. “This is our first vote. The Senate hasn’t been back in. We’ve been operating in a vacuum … We have been disadvantaged because we haven’t had the opportunity to get together.”
And now that the Democrats are together — geographically if not tactically — Kennedy says they’re in a race against time for the public’s attention. He said his constituents are concerned about prescription drugs, about Katrina, about heating oil and body armor and Jack Abramoff, and that it has been hard to get through to them with concerns about Alito in the brief period of time between the Judiciary Committee vote last week and the cloture vote this afternoon.
That may explain the past couple of weeks, but it doesn’t say much about the Democrats’ work over the past couple of decades. Or does it?
An FBI file contends that a young Edward M. Kennedy arranged to rent a brothel for a night while visiting Chile in 1961, a year before he was elected to the Senate.
The previously redacted State Department memo, dated Dec. 28, 1961, was released by Judicial Watch, a Washington-based organization that said it obtained it through a Freedom of Information lawsuit.
According to the memo, the Massachusetts Democrat made arrangements to rent the brothel “for an entire night” in Santiago earlier in 1961. “Kennedy allegedly invited one of the Embassy chauffeurs to participate in the night’s activities,” according to the memo.
One State Department official described Kennedy as “pompous and a spoiled brat,” according to the memo. Kennedy was making a fact-finding trip to several Latin American countries. “Kennedy met with a number of individuals known to have communist sympathies,” the memo said.
Kennedy was a 29-year-old assistant district attorney in Boston at the time of the trip. He was elected to the Senate in 1962 and served more than four decades until his death in 2009.
Kennedy’s family members had no immediate reaction to the release of the memo.
The documents from Judicial Watch provide no indication of the source of the allegations or whether the FBI believed the allegations were true. Judicial Watch said it waged a “tough” fight with the Obama administration for access to the previously secret documents.
Last June the FBI released more than 2,300 pages of documents from Kennedy’s file, many of them containing information about various death threats against Kennedy and his family. Some of the material was redacted by the FBI.
Some of the threats prompted investigations, some resulted in warnings to Kennedy or local law enforcement authorities. There is no indication any attempts were carried out.
Kennedy family members were given a chance to review and to raise objections to the documents before they were released last June. The FBI has additional documents on threats to Kennedy, possibly thousands more pages, that it plans to make public once the agency finishes reviewing them.
The family has no legal power to keep information withheld, the FBI has said, but the bureau does consider privacy concerns on a case-by-case basis.
This week marks the publication of Jimmy Carter’s private journal of his presidency, “White House Diary.” The entries are often brief, but Carter does offer an interesting account of one of the most widely discussed moments of his doomed 1980 reelection effort: Ted Kennedy’s apparent snub of him on the final night of the Democratic convention in New York, just after Carter had delivered his acceptance speech.
“Afterward,” Carter writes in his diary, “Kennedy drove over from his hotel, appeared on the platform along with a lot of other people, seemed to have had a few drinks, which I probably would have done myself. He was fairly cool and reserved, but the press made a big deal of it.”
They sure did — and for good reason. Kennedy’s challenge of Carter for the ’80 nod was unusually bitter and protracted. Even though Carter won twice as many delegates in the primary and caucus season, Kennedy fought all the way to the August convention, attempting to convince delegates to support a rule change that would have allowed them to vote their conscience on the first ballot — instead of being forced to cast a ballot for the candidate they’d been pledged to during the primary season. Only when this effort failed did Kennedy back down and end his campaign (with what was probably the best speech of his career). So it was only logical that the press would watch the body language closely when the two men came together onstage after Carter’s acceptance speech two nights later — and Kennedy’s discomfort was obvious. As the Washington Post reported it:
When Kennedy did arrive, wearing that familiar tight-lipped smile his traveling press corps has come to call “the smirk,” he strode into the crowd of Democratic officials already on the podium, gave Carter a perfunctory shake of the hand, and walked away to the side of the platform.
There followed a comical ballet in which Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter and House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill Jr. (Mass.) all tried futilely to lead Kennedy back to center stage for an arms-up pose with the president.
When Kennedy went to the left side of the platform to raise a fist toward his Massachusetts delegation, Carter made a beeline to join him and struck the same pose. But Kennedy’s arm had come down a split-second before Carter’s shot up.
You can watch some of Kennedy’s snub of Carter in this video:
Carter has already rasied eyebrows while promoting his diaries. In a “60 Minutes” segment that aired over the weekend, he told Lesley Stahl that “we would have had comprehensive healthcare now, had it not been for Ted Kennedy’s deliberately blocking the legislation that I proposed” as president. “It was his fault,” Carter added. “Ted Kennedy killed the bill.”
Most of the secret FBI files on the late Sen. Edward Kennedy being released Monday concern death threats against the longtime senator.
Alex Brown of the FBI’s records management division said the FBI would post some 2,000 pages of previously secret pages about the Massachusetts Democrat on the agency’s website.
The release of the documents has been highly anticipated by historians, scholars and others interested in the life and long public career of one of America’s most prominent and powerful politicians.
The Associated Press and other media organizations requested the documents through Freedom of Information Act requests.
Kennedy faced death threats when he ran for president in 1980 and before that in the years following the assassinations of his older brothers.
President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was slain in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968.
The deaths of his two older brothers cast a long shadow on Kennedy’s life, and prompted fears he too would be targeted by an assassin’s bullet.
After his brothers’ assassinations, Kennedy wrote in his memoir “True Compass” released last year, that he was easily startled at loud sounds, and would hit the deck whenever a car backfired.
Kennedy, who served in the Senate for nearly half a century, died in August 2009 after a yearlong struggle with brain cancer. He was 77 and the last surviving brother of the famed political family.
Tuesday night, Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley won the Democratic primary in a special election to replace the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. If all goes as expected, she’ll win the general election, held early next year, and be sworn in to the Senate.
Coakley was the front-runner going into the night, but her margin of victory was still impressive. In a four-way race, Coakley still managed to pick up a plurality of 47 percent, beating Rep. Michael Capuano’s 28 percent and the 13 percent and 12 percent that Alan Khazei and Stephen Pagliuca were able to pull in, respectively.
Beyond just giving Coakley the opportunity to take Kenedy’s place in the Senate, Tuesday’s vote represented a milestone for Massachusetts: This is the first time either party has nominated a woman for one of the state’s Senate seats.
Voters are heading to the polls in Massachusetts Tuesday, in the first step towards picking a longer-term replacement for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. This vote is just the primary — the general won’t be held until early next year — but given the Democratic advantage, it will all but decide the final outcome.
The race has flown under the radar thus far, largely because state attorney General Martha Coakley has consistently been favored in polls. She’s running against Rep. Michael Capuano, Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca and Alan Khazei, who started the community service organization City Year.
There is one interesting dynamic to the race. Former President Bill Clinton endorsed Coakley recently. That pits him against former Gov. Michael Dukakis, the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988; Dukakis is backing Capuano.
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