Ben Smith reports that right-wing groups met with several Republican Senators yesterday to plot strategy on how to defeat President Obama's Supreme Court nominee:
Leaders of some of the social and judicial conservative groups planning an all-out fight over the Supreme Court nominee met with Republican Senators yesterday, a source says, passing on a couple of the items that came up in the meetings.
Centrally, it remains unclear how broadly the Republican leadership will commit to a fight, particularly on this first nominee, and so that's the question currently being arbitrated.
One of the conservatives talking points was money. Conservatives are telling the GOP that a court confrontation will be great fundraising, saying the NRSC raised some $200,000 at a breakfast yesterday with wealthy conservative donors, with the court issue dominating discussion, and that the key outside groups have raised some $1.2 million in advance of an expected fight in recent weeks, on top of money that other top conservative legal warries [sic] like Leonard Leo and C. Boyden Gray have been raising toward this cause over the last few months.
The groups are also hoping to reverse what has generally been positive press for most of the mentioned possible nominees, and there were calls to "take off the gloves, " and talk of a video being released on a call with 60 conservative groups tomorrow.
One other tidbit from the meetings: Republicans could raise objections to Elena Kagan's nomination because of the possible delays in getting documents related to her service in the Clinton Administration from the Clinton Library.
Of course, right-wing groups like the Judicial Confirmation Network and the Committee for Justice (who were presumably involved in this meeting) are raising millions of dollars to prevent President Obama's nominee from getting confirmed, even though they were founded in order "to support the confirmation of highly qualified individuals to the Supreme Court of the United States." But only under President Bush, apparently.
And why exactly are there calls to "take off the gloves"? Against who? There hasn't even been a nominee yet.
It's good to see that these groups, which once existed to ensure that President Bush's nominees received fair treatment and an up-or-down vote, are now fully committed to savaging and defeating President Obama's nominee ... even before they have any idea who it is.
