Red-Stater for Rudy

Dan McLaughlin of RedState pens an excellent piece entitled, “Why I’m With Rudy (Part I).” In this piece, Dan discusses the many reasons that Giuliani stands head-and-shoulders above the rest of the GOP field, including Rudy’s innate ability to lead, his stance on the war, his ability to flip blue portions of America, and his conservative positions on the issues. Money quote:

That said, and while I recognize that there are other Life issues on the agenda, the core battlefield for abortion - the battle we need to win before we can fight any others - is in the composition of the Supreme Court. A pro-choicer who appoints good judges is as functionally pro-life as Harry Reid is functionally pro-choice. (I have discussed this issue in much more exhaustive detail before). And while we need to hear much more from him on this issue, there is, thus far, every indication that Rudy is both willing to appoint conservative judges and able to sell them against a hostile Senate - he’s spoken favorably of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who he knows from their days in the Reagan Justice Department.

And while Mike Huckabee is a solid pro-lifer and Sam Brownback is a genuine hero on life issues, the other top-tier candidates are less obviously reliable on this issue. Romney, of course, declared himself a committed pro-choicer in 1994, though his repeated conversions on the issue lend a lot of credence to Ted Kennedy’s description of him as “multiple choice” on abortion. McCain has a more consistent pro-life record and voted to confirm the likes of Alito, Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, but three things concern me about McCain on judges - first, his demonstrable willingness to sell out the base to win media plaudits, second, his statements in 2000 that he’d like Souter-backer Warren Rudman as his Attorney General and that he remained proud of all the GOP Justices he’d voted for (which implicitly included Souter and Kennedy), and third, the fact that McCain’s political identity is so wrapped up in his campaign finance crusade, a crusade that may influence him to pick judges who take the written constitution with its pesky free-speech guarantees less than seriously. I’m not saying I’m sold that Rudy would be necessarily better at appointing judges than Romney or McCain, but (1) it’s a close contest and (2) he’d obviously be better than any Democrat.

Life issues are, indeed, important. And if this were peacetime, they would preclude me from supporting Mayor Giuliani. But there’s a war on, folks, and a lot of lives (born and unborn) depend on that, too. In this field, if Mayor Giuliani can make the sale that he will, in fact, appoint solid constitutionalists to the federal courts, that will tide us through.

Tide us through it will. Chalk up one more conservative in the Rudy camp.

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