Posted on 10/07/2005 8:37:49 PM PDT by quidnunc
A lot of us here are old enough to actually remember the seventies, the shambles the country was in after half a century of liberal rule (including the liberal Republicans Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard "we're all Keynesians on this bus" Nixon, and Gerald "WIN" Ford).
Even more of us are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan. Reagan made some bad decisions (Beirut, Sandra Day O'Connor); and he suffered some serious disappointments and setbacks.
But the thing about Reagan was that he never lost heart. He was the cheerful warrior. If he lost a battle, he took the best compromise he could get — and then continued to work together with his center-right and conservative allies for the victory that eluded him the last time. He famously said that if half a loaf was all we could get, then let's get half a loaf now and go back for the rest later.
There's an old British expression that may sound quaint, but it's just as critical today as in the days of Benjamin Disraeli: Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.
The center-right coalition is critical to everything the Republicans have achieved since 1995, when we took over the House and Senate … but it's in terrible danger now. And who is threatening it? President Bush, because he nominated Harriet Miers?
No. Bush isn't threatening to destroy the coalition: that honor goes to the enraged critics of Miss Miers.
I don't think it was a good nomination. I think it was a big mistake. But it is not a catastrophe … and it certainly is not worth pulling down the entire edifice upon our heads, like a blinded Samson pullling down the Temple of Dagon. Not only will that destroy the entire Republican agenda, it will result in even more judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — the very result the anti-Miers camp claims it wants to avoid! Remember, Samson, too, died in the collapse of the Philistine temple.
This is, quite literally, insane: because they're mad that Bush appointed someone they don't know will be a conservative judge, they'll engineer a situation where we'll get three hundred judges that we know damned well will be the most liberal judges President Dean can possibly find.
Oh, and we'll lose the war on terrorism, too. We'll try to fight it as a police action … you know, the European way. The French way. We'll get the opportunity to experience Intifada up close and personal.
-snip-
The Harriet Miers brouhaha has exposed an attitude that is very unbecoming many of the current conservative intellectual aristocracy: Their apparent failure to recognize how lucky they are to have had a chance at an Ivy League education. This seems to have lead to an elitism that is un-American, un-conservative, un-Republican, and flatly unattractive. (Not that I feel strongly about this, of course.)
One wonders whether some of our right-wing Ivy League brethren are not just a little too impressed with their status. As Beldar notes, referring to Harriet Miers:
Hypothetically, if your daddy has a stroke when you're a freshman in college, and you stay close to home so you can work a scholarship job while you're going to the best college and then the best law school in town, and then you clerk for a local federal district judge, and you go to work for one of the best firms in town (but that town isn't Washington or New York), and you go on to rack up a string of exceptional professional successes — does that nevertheless mean you're forever after a "third-rate" lawyer, forever after unworthy to be considered qualified for the Supreme Court, because you didn't go off to some Ivy League school?
I have a hunch there are many, many Americans who are bright overachievers and whose decisions about college and professional school were limited by similar life circumstances. I might be considered one of them, and I fear that many who had a more fortunate teen-age situation fail to appreciate that there, but for the grace of God, go they.
-snip-
That's part of what's so disappointing about the Ramesh Ponnorus (Princeton), Ann Coulters (Cornell), Rich Lowrys (University of Virginia - who let him in here, anyway?), Charles Krauthammers (Harvard), David Frums (Yale and Harvard), Laura Ingrahams (Dartmouth) sorry, Laura!), and several others. Instead of reflecting the sort of humble gratitude that one might hope to see from them (or that one sees routinely from Ben Stein), this crowd seems to consider themselves fit to judge the "excellence" of those whom they find to be lesser intellectual lights. The shame of all this is that this circle of hard-core conservative elites is affiliated with the Republican Party. (These days Laura loves to say she's a conservative first, a Republican second, but that charming attitude is a story for another very long post, someday, when I am in the mood for a lot of venting.)
As Republicans who have been advanced greatly in life because of their affiliation with the party, these folks owe the rest of us better than the preening elitism that seems to have overcome them. Reading NRO's The Corner these days makes me feel like I am in a private dining room in New York City, listening while a bunch of Ivy League conservatives pass around the brandy, smoke cigars, and comment archly on G.W. Bush's betrayal of his class. (Kathryn Jean Lopez notes today that she "hasn't given up on" Bush just yet. What a relief.) It's a most unappealing kind of echo chamber.
What the Miers nomination seems to have provoked within this group is a feeling of deep personal betrayal by President Bush: The right-wing Ivies seem to believe that they developed a stable of conservative legal titans, fully equipped to fill slots on the Supreme Court. After they installed Bush as president, they presumably believe, it was his duty to do their bidding and nominate one of their anointed ones to the Court. When Bush failed to do so, they came unglued.
How else to explain the near-glee with which Laura Ingraham today related Bill Kristol's appearance on the Today Show, where he called for Bush to withdraw the Miers nomination, or the Krauthammer WaPo piece today calling for the same thing? Our conservative philosopher-kings believe they are entitled to the nominee they want, and they are bitterly disappointed that they were passed over.
In an interview aired on her show today, Laura Ingraham told Ed Gillespie that the problem is not elitism, it's that her group of conservatives have standards of "excellence" that Harriet Miers simply does not meet. Really? Did Clarence Thomas, Laura's favorite justice, meet those standards? I seem to recall that he was a federal appeals court judge for only a very short period, and that he testified during his confirmation hearings that he had never discussed Roe v. Wade with anyone. Nor was Thomas a writer of law review articles. Laura now criticizes Miers for those same deficiencies. "Standards of excellence" indeed.
-snip-
(Lowell Brown in The Hedgehog Blog, October 7, 2005)
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Was Thomas a stealth judge? He's certainly the gold standard now but the intensity of the attack against him (with outright slander as one of the lefties tools !)convinces me the left knew what they were getting.
People thought he was a conservative but beyond they didn't know anything about his judicial philospohy.
"Once again we consulted with Democrats and Republicans in the United States Senate; received good advice from more than 80 senators. And once again, one person stood out as exceptionally well-suited to sit on the highest court of our nation."
-- President G. W. Bush
When Dubya made this remark, I understood him to say that he had enough votes to win confirmation for her already.
Now consulting with 80+ senators is not the same thing as consulting with interest groups...
How could the Republican senators possibly vote against Miers when they voted to confirmed Ginsburg and Breyer almost unanimously?
I don't anticipate this nomination being defeated.
Unlike many others, at the time of confirmation, I thought Ginsberg and Breyer were improvements over some of the other names that had been floated (Mario Cuomo and Bruce Babbitt in particular). It would not have worked to defeat Clinton nominee after Clinton nominee in hopes that he would eventually nominate a conservative.
My opinion may have been colored by the MSM too much though. In particular, I am troubled by Ginsberg's recent defense of consideration of foreign law. I am hoping that Miers' degree in mathematics has given her some idea of what "selection bias" is.
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