Politics & Power Quote by Steve Chabot

The line is engineered as a small act of political jujitsu: it turns procedural opposition into evidence of moral panic. By saying liberals are "fighting so hard" whenever Bush appoints federal judges, Chabot frames judicial confirmation not as a constitutional check-and-balance but as a battlefield where only one side is behaving irrationally. The vagueness is doing the heavy lifting. "Liberals" becomes a catch-all antagonist, "fighting" suggests obstruction and aggression, and "any federal judges" implies indiscriminate hostility rather than targeted concern about specific nominees. It’s an argument by mood, not by record.

The subtext is a loyalty test. If Democrats resist, they’re not scrutinizing qualifications; they’re trying to block democracy’s spoils. That helps Republicans recast the judiciary as another front in the culture war, where the base already assumes stakes like abortion, gun rights, and church-state questions. Federal judges are lifetime appointments, which makes them perfect political currency: you can talk about "judges" and quietly mean Roe, affirmative action, and executive power without litigating the details on camera.

Context matters: this was the Bush era, when confirmations were becoming a proxy war over ideological control of the courts, accelerated by the memory of Bork, the rise of the Federalist Society pipeline, and the hardening of Senate tactics on both sides. Chabot’s intent is less to persuade swing voters on jurisprudence than to pre-empt criticism, delegitimize opposition, and rally his coalition around a simple narrative: resistance equals extremism, and the president’s nominees deserve deference.