Saturday

 

Problems with having too much money?

Orin Kerr relates the story of his mother being push-polled on John Roberts and abortion. Without going into Roberts' merits, I don't really understand why any liberal/democratic interest group would want to spend their money on this. Let us assume (extraordinarily optimistically) that every person who is push-polled is "persuaded" that Roberts' confirmation would be a bad thing, AND contacts their Senator to express their feelings. Does anyone actually believe that will lead to Roberts not being confirmed? Senators will (rightly) calculate that far too few voters make their decisions based on a Senators vote to confirm or lack thereof, especially for Senators who aren't up for election anytime soon, and vote in whatever manner they would have anyway. Since there is no reason to think that Roberts lacks majority support right now (I would actually predict that he gets over 70 votes in favor), and no reason to think that push-polling will change how Senators are going to vote on Roberts, why spend money on it? The only thing I can think of is that they think maybe it will be useful in some future Senatorial election, but it seems too much of an indirect, circuitous route to harming a Senator's chances to have much of a point to it.

Surely there are more effective ways for a minority party (and its adjunct organizations) to spend money on trying to achieve policy goals and becoming a majority party again, which would be the best way to achieve these policy goals. In particular, if your (group's) concern is laws restricting abortion, it seems like one good way to use your funds would be to lobby for the repeal of state anti-abortion laws, thereby lessening the damage done by any cutback or overturning of Roe v. Wade. Or just save the money for the 2006 elections.

# posted by washerdreyer @ 8/06/2005 07:23:00 PM
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