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Hugh Hewitt has jumped the shark. I do not know that I will ever be able to entertain an argument of his seriously again. Suspicion was raised when Hugh backed Arlen Specter for Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Suspicion is confirmed with Hugh's unyielding defense of Harriet Miers. Hugh has ceased to be a conservative pundit and is now a shill for the administration. While critics of the Miers nomination are willing to give her credit for much, Hugh has apparently ignored all objectivity and closed his eyes to all concerns so that he can be an effective pimp of...

Monday, October 24, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT President Bush has returned from a weekend in Camp David, where much of the discussion centered on the beleaguered nomination of Harriet Miers. While the president is determined to press forward, the prognosis he received was grim. Her visits with senators have gone poorly. Her written answers to questions from the Senate were sent back as if they were incomplete homework. The nominee herself has stumbled frequently in the tutorials in which government lawyers are grilling her in preparation for her Nov. 7 hearings.

WASHINGTON — Republican and Democratic senators called on President Bush yesterday to release documents relating to Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' service as White House counsel, with some warning that she may not win confirmation otherwise. In discussions on television talk shows, senators of both parties said that the biggest obstacle to Miers' confirmation is a lack of information about her capabilities. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., ordinarily a Bush ally but also a social conservative who is expected to seek the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, warned that the Senate "is not a rubber stamp." "If we're to give advice...

WASHINGTON – Harriet Miers, President Bush's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court to replace Sandra Day O'Connor, is on record as supporting the establishment of the International Criminal Court, homosexual adoptions, a major local tax increase and women in combat, WorldNetDaily has learned. While some conservative leaders and organizations were stunned by the appointment, most were not alarmed by the lack of a paper trail by the nominee who has never served as a judge at any level. But a profile of her positions as a leader of the American Bar Association, a Dallas city councilwoman and as presidential counselor...

If U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts' confirmation hearing is any guide, we won't learn anything from Harriet Miers' confirmation hearing. So here are some questions we would like President George W. Bush to answer. You said, "Trust me." But why should we trust you when experience proves we could not trust the judgment of President Reagan (who gave us Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy) or President George H.W. Bush (who gave us Justice David H. Souter)? Are you more trustworthy than Reagan or your father? You said, "She's not going to change. ... Twenty...

We need a fool in the White House. No, I've not joined the leftist Bush-is-an-idiot crowd. The president is a smart man, but he's in deep trouble. And no one in the White House seems willing to tell him why, which is where an official fool -- or White House jester, if you prefer -- would come in handy. In the Middle Ages, the court fool was often the only person who could point out the king's foibles and live to tell about it. No less than some medieval castle, the White House can become a haven for yes-men (and...

George Will is quite rightly recognized as among the two or three finest pundits of the last 25 years. Put aside his bow ties and his very well known love of baseball: Will has consistently produced entertaining and insightful prose over a very long period of time. It is simply wrong to reject Will as "no big deal." But he can and does throw spokes, and he did so in Sunday's column. From Will's column: "Last week's ruling divided the justices into unlikely cohorts, thereby providing a timely reminder that concepts such as ``judicial activism,'' ``strict construction'' and ``original intent''...

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers told the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday that she believes there's a right to privacy in the Constitution, a basic underpinning of the Supreme Court's landmark abortion ruling Roe v. Wade. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., the panel chairman, said that during a nearly two-hour private meeting Monday, Miers also told him that she believed the court had properly decided a precedent-setting 1965 privacy case, Griswold v. Connecticut, which established the legal foundation that led to Roe v. Wade. Miers also assured a Senate Democrat on Monday that she's...

WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Making the rounds Monday on Capitol Hill, Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers sought to clarify her judicial philosophy but may have wound up sowing more confusion about her views on abortion. Her position on the contentious topic appeared to gain some clarity when Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., emerged from a nearly two-hour meeting with her, saying she'd affirmed a key underpinning of the Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion. But a short time later, his spokesman issued a statement saying the senator had misunderstood the nominee and that she had not taken...

Supreme Court confirmation battles usually involve excavations of the nominee's judicial opinions, legal briefs and decades-old government memos. Harriet Miers is the first nominee to hit trouble because of thank-you letters. Miers's paper trail may be relatively short, but it makes plain that her climb through Texas legal circles and into George W. Bush's inner circle was aided by a penchant for cheerful personal notes. Years later, even some of her supporters are cringing -- and her opponents are viciously making merry -- at the public disclosure of this correspondence and other writings from the 1990s. Bush may have enjoyed...

The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has splintered President Bush's base and triggered a growing demand from his own supporters to withdraw her nomination. "What a stupid, stupid mistake," said Mark W. Smith, a member of the conservative Federalist Society who has actively supported Mr. Bush but wants to see the nomination withdrawn. "You cannot fix this for 25 years." Conservatives have stuck with Mr. Bush through the bloodiest and gloomiest days of the war in Iraq, held firm as administration officials are investigated for revealing a CIA operative's identity and given him a pass on the...

"Who's In the Doghouse? Miers, Miers." Who Put Her In The Doghouse? Innerbelt Conservatives! I have the highest esteem for these conservative pundits, but they have shot a week of broadcast time condescending a woman who is an "unknown" to them. There is probably a lot they don't know. I just don't like hearing 7/24 what they don't know. Has Air America offered them better contracts?

WASHINGTON--When President Bush nominated Harriet Miers on Monday, we saw it as a missed opportunity. It left us underwhelmed, not appalled. But having spent last evening communing here with some 1,000 conservatives at National Review's 50th anniversary dinner, we see a political disaster in the making. We talked to quite a few people, and we heard not a single kind word about the nomination from anyone who wasn't on the White House staff. A couple of our soundings led us to think that such support as it has received has been more sycophantic than sincere. One putative proponent privately distanced...