Next up: Roger B. Taney (or someone like him) for Supreme Court

If all the liberals, or Progressives, or whatever they're calling themselves this week, would just calm down about the right-wing track record of Judge Elito, we could all settle on a perfectly qualified replacement for Sandra Day O'Connor and get on with the business of keeping people quiet and taking over the world.

Granted, Elito is an eastern pointy-headed intellectual AND an Italian, but he has demonstrated many other redeeming qualities in his career-long campaign for the job. Hey, that lady from Texas with the spooky eyes, whatshername Myers, saw the handwriting on the wall and withdrew her name for the sake of the greater good - just as instructed, according to the plan - making the impeccable credentials and legal mind of Elito (or my Great Aunt Clarabelle) look good by comparison.

But that's old news. Now the majority members of the Senate Juciciary Committee are openly attacking Ruth Bader Ginsburg for her "judicial activism" and, in the same breath, pledging to overturn precedent when it's needed. One guess which precedent in particular they have in mind. The goon they had beating the drum on NPR based his argument on the brilliant observation that NOWHERE in the Constitution does it say that a woman has a right to an abortion. Or did he say "abolition"? Maybe they'll overturn both of those 'A' words.

It's going to take more than a limp filibuster by a couple of Micks from Massachusetts to derail this railroad. Now that the party of Hayes, McKinley, Taft, Harding, Taft, Coolidge, Taft, Hoover, Taft, Nixon, et al, has the momentum, we can expect the next vacancy to be filled by someone in the mold of the respected jurist Roger B. Taney. As the author of both the historic Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson decisions, Taney sets the standard by which to measure any aspiring reactionary judge.

You want credentials? How about upholding the property rights of responsible, God-fearing Missouri planters? How about limiting the overburdened court system of frivolous lawsuits by noncitizen laborers? How about upholding the right of states to maintain their own apartheid (but EQUAL) facilities without interference from Big Government. The man is a compassionate conservative's wet dream. I bet he was a believer in manifest destiny, too, clearing the way for God's chosen white Anglo-Saxon Protestant people to, in the words of Ann Coulter, take over their country, kill their leaders, and convert them to Christianity.

Except he's dead. So that just creates an opportunity for some young, ambitious Elito-like lawyer to begin building his or her own resume along the lines of the Taney prototype, just as Elito did. Defending a tobacco company here, an oil company there, a drug company would look good, definitely something back-tracking from affirmative action or medicare, in short, anything to impress future employers, clients, nominators, advisers and consenters of our new unitary government.