With a single stroke -- the nomination of Harriet Miers -- the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work -- for liberals.
There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association's journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no "ability to write clearly and argue incisively."
The administration's defense of the nomination is pathetic: Ms. Miers was a bar association president (a nonqualification for anyone familiar with the bureaucratic service that leads to such presidencies); she shares Mr. Bush's judicial philosophy (which seems to consist of bromides about "strict construction" and the like); and she is, as an evangelical Christian, deeply religious. That last, along with her contributions to pro-life causes, is designed to suggest that she does not like Roe v. Wade, though it certainly does not necessarily mean that she would vote to overturn that constitutional travesty."
Who do you think wrote this editorial? It wasn't some democrat upset at how badly he's been spanked for 6 years. It was Robert Bork - the conservative of all conservatives, the neo of all neo-cons and one of the biggest Bush supporters around.
With his nomination of his personal lawyer (that's right not district attorney or even a justice department lawyer) Bush has chosen the single least qualified person he could to fill the O'conner vacancy. Some politico, I can't remember who, said that Harriet Miers would not make it on anyone's list of top 100 conservative lawyers in America. Why? Because she is simply not bright enough!
Bush is surpassing the Clinton white house's cronyism with this appointment.
2 comments:
Why? If you look at this choice through a Bush as ideologue perspective, than we could make a guess that Miers has made some promise, implicit or explicit, to bring down Roe v. Wade. So why is the rest of the culturally conservative right so freaked out?
And if we look at it from the lens that the Bush administration makes strategic decisions to serve themselves and stay in power (and this lens is getting harder and harder to look through), what do we find is the motivation for this nomination? I can't see it.
So is that what it is? Pure and simple cronyism to the point that the whole country is pissed off? It just seems to brazen.
The general view here in the Washington media is that Bush (read: his handlers and strategy advisors) have made a serious misstep in Meirs nomination. That combined with various other percieved stumbles (disaster response, DeLay, Rove, Iraq) in their policies seem to have opened the door for opposition inroads.
Given that this administration has so tightly controlled and orchestrated all other facets of their presidency, I am wary of counting them out. If today was Oct 22 2008, then I'd expect the government to fall. The Dems need to get their machine in order.
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