He did it again. But no Republican should have been surprised. Sen. Arlen Specter has a long history of stabbing his party’s conservatives in the back. Ronald Reagan was one of the first to feel the point of his blade:
At the end of his first term, he voted against the Reagan Administration in two bitter, losing battles: to make William Bradford Reynolds associate attorney general, and Jefferson Sessions III a federal district-court judge. An even more bitter vote came at the beginning of his second term, when Judge Robert Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court. Specter didn’t like Bork’s opinions—”in sharp variance from Justices from Holmes all the way to Chief Justice Rehnquist.” But he also said he didn’t like the possibility that they might not be Bork’s opinions: “Where’s the predictability?” Specter’s announcement that he would vote against Bork marked the end of that battle.
Nicknamed “Snarlin Arlen,” Specter is a tough customer. He has beaten Hodgkin’s lymphoma twice, survived a brain tumor and taken heart bypass surgery in stride. After emerging victorious from such battles, Republican presidents do not intimidate him in the slightest. George W. Bush can testify to this after having fought the Pennsylvania Senator over issues such as Guantanamo and FISA.
