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WASHINGTON — Bold conservative thinkers with clear public records need not apply.

An increasing number of conservative activists fear that is the message President Bush is sending with his two choices for the Supreme Court.

This week’s nomination of White House Counsel Harriet E. Miers, following Bush’s earlier selection of John G. Roberts Jr. as chief justice, means that the president has chosen two Supreme Court nominees with limited — or virtually no — public records on the key constitutional controversies dividing the parties. In the process, he’s bypassed a long list of judges with consistent conservative records on state and federal courts.

“I don’t know that there is a deliberate message — I think he is just trying to avoid trouble — but the message comes through: Do not be controversial, do not express strong opinions that arouse opposition,” said Robert H. Bork, the conservative legal scholar and former federal judge. Bork’s extensive writings keyed an explosive confirmation battle that culminated in his rejection by the Senate when President Reagan nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1987.

During almost five years of bruising partisan warfare on issues from taxes to Iraq, few people have ever accused Bush of dodging a fight. But that’s exactly the charge he is now facing from disgruntled conservatives.

They contend that Bush has chosen Miers, and even Roberts, largely because he fears Democratic resistance to conservatives with more concrete public records, such as appellate court Judges J. Michael Luttig and Edith H. Jones.

“Is the president sending a message that these distinguished conservatives are too controversial to be nominated for the high court, even with a Senate containing 55 Republicans?” a Wall Street Journal editorial asked Tuesday.

White House officials and some Bush allies on the right deny the charge that he is gun-shy about promoting nominees with extensive public records. They note that the president has consistently appointed known conservatives, such as Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla R. Owen, to the powerful federal appellate courts — even renominating them after they were initially blocked by Democratic filibusters.

“In the president’s mind, it is not disqualifying if you have a public track record of conservatism, and he has proved that through his appellate court appointees,” said White House counselor Dan Bartlett.

Bush, at a Tuesday news conference, sought to assure his supporters that Miers shared his conservative views and would remain steadfast to them.

“I know her well enough to be able to say that she’s not going to change, that 20 years from now she’ll be the same person, with the same philosophy, that she is today,” he said.

But Bush’s critics on the right maintain that his reluctance to nominate a known conservative for the Supreme Court sends a strong signal encouraging caution and consensus among conservative legal thinkers and judges.

“I suppose a lot of people are not going to want to join the Federalist Society,” said Bork, in a reference to a conservative legal group.

Both sides agree that the 1987 defeat of Bork marked a turning point in Supreme Court nominations. Since then, both parties have generally favored nominees without the detailed and controversial record he carried to the witness table.

“It’s almost become a qualification,” said Bork, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute think tank.

But Bush’s conservative critics say he has carried this tendency to a new height through his selection of Roberts, who had served just over two years as a federal judge, and Miers, who has never served on the bench or written publicly on major legal questions.

In contrast, both of President Clinton’s Supreme Court appointees — Stephen G. Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg — had served for more than a decade on federal appellate courts. And Ginsburg had written widely as a law professor and general counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Bush’s conservative critics acknowledge that Roberts’ limited public record made it more difficult for Democrats to organize against him, an advantage that Miers may also benefit from.

But the president’s critics maintain that Bush is underestimating his ability to win confirmation for a more clearly defined candidate while Republicans hold 55 Senate seats; only twice since 1930 has a president’s Supreme Court nomination been rejected while his party controlled a Senate majority.

“If Bush feels he could have put a Mike Luttig on there without a fight, he would have done it,” said Mark Levin, president of the conservative Landmark Legal Foundation and a former chief of staff to Edwin Meese III, who was attorney general under Reagan. “It’s a political calculation that he’s got enough on his table right now, and why instigate a fight?”

Luttig, of Virginia, is a favorite of conservative activists.

The critics on the right see two principal risks in choosing justices without a long pedigree. One is that without a firm anchor in conservative legal views, they will trend leftward on the court — the way almost all conservatives believe David H. Souter, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, has done. This fear is greater about Miers because Roberts’ advocacy for conservative positions in previous GOP administrations has left the right considerably more, though not completely, confident about him.

The other fear is that the nomination of candidates without lengthy public records will discourage conservatives from advancing controversial positions that challenge legal conventional wisdom — either in their writings or on the courts. The Wall Street Journal said that by appointing Miers, the president “missed a chance to send a message that taking firm sides in our judicial debates is not politically disqualifying.”

Bush advisors and allies say such conclusions misread his logic for the Miers appointment. They say his long personal relationship with Miers gives him more confidence about her judicial philosophy than he could obtain from reading a judge’s opinions or from a short interview.

“Harriet Miers reflects less a reticence to appoint someone with a record and more a commitment to appoint someone he knows shares his judicial philosophy,” said Leonard Leo, a former vice president of the Federalist Society now working with groups supporting the president’s court nominees.

Still, the uneasiness on the right about Bush’s decision-making has reached the point that two prominent legal conservatives this week joked that the best thing that ever happened to Roberts was the refusal by the Senate, then controlled by the Democrats, to confirm him after President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1992.

If Roberts had been confirmed then, his lengthy legal record might have dissuaded the current President Bush from nominating him to the Supreme Court this summer, said one of the conservatives, who asked not to be identified.

When European Jewish settlers embarked on brutal ethnic cleansing to establish Israel in 1948, they thought the Palestinian population would be the least of their problems. In fact, Zionist leaders like David Ben-Gurion believed that “the refugee problem would resolve itself”.

There was deep-seated conviction among Zionists that the Palestinians lacked an identity, and they would just flee to neighbouring Arab countries and assimilate. They would not come back to claim their stolen land.

But what happened was the exact opposite.

Decade after decade, the Palestinian national cause grew stronger. Today, few survivors of the Nakba of 1948 remain, but the national commitment to Palestinian rights and historical justice is as strong as ever. That is because the older generations did not teach the younger ones to forget the trauma and move on; they taught them to remember and to keep the keys to their ancestral homes in their minds.

The “refugee problem” did not “resolve itself” not just because of Palestinian determination and resilience, but also because the Israeli policies of violence and dispossession backfired.

Israel’s theft of land and resources and violent displacement of Palestinians was the starting point for every Palestinian generation to reject and resist occupation.

As Israel succeeded in usurping more and more Palestinian land, it failed miserably in controlling the Palestinian consciousness.

Despite continuous Israeli efforts to turn refugee camps into isolated enclaves, recruit agents and collaborators to undermine unity, and introduce international bodies to redefine the refugee issue as a purely humanitarian one, it failed to dismantle the Palestinian national cause.

Those who were dispossessed and violated – the Palestinian refugees – became the most ardent carriers of the idea of resistance. Refugee camps became the centres of peaceful and armed struggle. These camps gave birth to prominent Palestinian thinkers, doctors, educators and leaders, who spread one message: the rejection of the Israeli occupation and the insistence on Palestinian rights.

Palestinian refugees were the drivers of the first Intifada of 1987 and the second Intifada of 2000. They were at the centre of any subsequent mobilisation to resist the Israeli occupation.

The colonial project saw no option but to ratchet up its brutality. Repeated massacres, mass imprisonment and relentless efforts to uproot communities did not achieve subjugation. This approach failed and the Gaza Strip – where 80 percent of the population are refugees – stands as the clearest evidence of that failure.

After the launch of its genocidal assault on Gaza in October 2023, the Israeli government repeatedly described the war as “existential”. If Israel itself acknowledges today that the fourth generation of Palestinians, the descendants of the survivors of the Nakba, represent a threat to its existence, then this is in itself an admission of the collapse of Ben-Gurion’s prediction and the strategic failure of the Israeli project to eliminate the Palestinian people.

But Israel has not just failed, it has also become trapped. It is stuck in the paradox of the futility of its own brutal power. The more violence, mass killings and displacement it carries out and the more it reproduces the Nakba, the more determined the Palestinian people become to resist. Repression is not uprooting Palestine, it is helping it take deeper root.

The Gaza genocide is perhaps the best illustration of this deadly paradox. More than 72,000 Palestinians have been massacred, more than 170,000 injured, and 1.9 million displaced. Most homes have been damaged or destroyed.

What is the result of all this? When a Palestinian child is born today in a tent and grows up without most of his family, without a school, a playground, proper healthcare, or a home, he or she won’t need a complex historical narrative to understand who is responsible for this and what needs to be done to achieve justice.

But the self-defeating impact of Israeli brutality is not limited to Palestine alone. Israel’s genocide has backfired on a global scale. It has allowed the Palestinian cause to grow beyond the confines of a marginal, left-wing issue into one that increasingly attracts attention across the political spectrum in the West but also elsewhere in the world.

Activists and ordinary citizens of different political convictions now stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Many do so, despite facing retribution, arrest and prosecution for their support of Palestinian rights.

The Palestinian cause has also become an influential factor in local elections in many countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, where support for the Israeli occupation and genocide can cost candidates an electoral win.

As a result, the Palestinian issue has grown beyond a regional struggle to become a defining moral question for people across the world.

This has left the occupation locked in a permanent confrontation with what cannot be defeated: memory. The more it tries to erase the Palestinian cause, the more it is etched in the Palestinian and global consciousness.

If he had been alive today, Ben-Gurion would have been dismayed to learn that Zionism secured its own defeat the moment it embarked on the Nakba.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

April 19 (UPI) — Blue Origin successfully launched its New Glenn rocket and landed its booster stage, but it delivered a communications satellite into an orbit too low to be useful.

New Glenn-3, the third launch of the company’s rocket, cleared the tower just before 7:30 a.m. EDT on Sunday morning and roughly six minutes later its first stage touched down on the “Jacklyn” drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

The fully reusable booster, called “Never Tell Me The Odds,” was making its second landing as the mission hit its second stage engine cutoff, entered orbit and released AST SpaceMobile’s BlueBird 7 satellite successfully.

The release was successful and the satellite powered up properly, but had been placed into “an off-nominal orbit,” Blue Origin said in a post on X.

“During the New Glenn 3 mission, BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle,” AST said in a press release.

“While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its on-board thruster technology and will de-orbited,” the company said. “The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy.”

AST’s BlueBird 7 satellite is part of a space-based cellular broadband network the company is building that will be accessible using normal smartphones.

The satellite would have been the eighth the company has put in orbit for the network, has satellites number through 32 in production and expects BlueBird 8, BlueBird 9 and BlueBird 10 to be completed in the next month.

AST said that it plans to continue launching satellites roughly every other month for the rest 2026 using “multiple launch providers,” with a goal of 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year.

Blue Origin, in addition to launching satellites for commercial and government entities, is also building a prototype MK1 “Endurance” lander as a test vehicle in an uncrewed moon landing later this year, Space.com reported.

The prototype is a test run for its MK2 lunar lander that will be used in NASA’s Artemis program to explore the moon and establish a permanent human presence there.