Posted on 05/11/2006 2:11:27 PM PDT by Paul Ross
The ABA has unanimously rated President Bush judicial nominee Michael Wallace “not qualified� to sit on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Liberal groups piled on, calling for the withdrawal of Wallace’s nomination after receiving the group’s lowest rating. According to the AP story, not counting the latest ratings only six of nearly 200 nominees since 2003 have received “not qualified� grade.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
No. Not yet anyways! Are you?
He resigned of his own free will.
Nobody is saying different.
The admin had nothing to do with it.
They didn't ask for it. But they certainly had sent signals that he "wasn't on their short list" for the next Supreme Court appointments. He was not Politically Correct...being lamentably a white male.
No doubt about that. I agree.
What I am getting at was the complacency that seems rife in the upper strategic councils around the administration. The breezy assumption that we are in the cat birds seat to get all of our judicial appointments through now after we got Roberts and Alito through... I'm afraid that is just not at all realistic.
The President's strategery on Big Governmentism = "compassion", pushing multiculturalism instead of assimilation, and pushing an extremist form of globalism, and the unseemly political trafficking in illegals, openly conspiring with a foreign nation to perpetuate it, and pushing feminism...among the short list...have all backfired "Big Time"!
Particularly with the sliming attacks on the "Base" at every turn...he has sunk his own battleship. Or sawed off the branch of the tree he was sitting on. Shades of Gerald Ford!!!!
The effects of the loss of the base, his 'governing support", means that everything is now at risk. And I mean everything. Especially the judicial appointments in the future.
Yes. Pretty brazen on their part.
It must have galled the ABA to know they played a part in getting Roberts and Alito confirmed.
Obviously! At least the new Committee Members.
Looks like the partisan knife is back out now.
Yep. My take exactly.
Ditto. But the President should be openly campaigning against the recent politicizations...and making affirmative headway against these louts. His administration needs to go on the offensive against the liberals. And say so.
Time to stop being "moderate" or "bipartisan" anything. He must stop trying so hard, like Ford, his father, and Dole before him... to get partisan liberals to like him. Not only will it never happen, but you totally debase any coherent governing philosophy with the constant cave-ins to their caterwauling.
The Best Defense is a Good Offense.
Possibly, but did you read his resignation letter? I personally don't think that it was so mercenary a motive. I agree with Hugh Hewitt that perhaps Luttig was simply getting stale in the Court of Appeals, and needed a change of scenery. And moving to Boeing's General Counsel position and a Corp. V.P. slot therein presented a unique opportunity to still serve the country. That is clearly true. Above all, Luttig is a patriot.
Hugh is still nurturing the hope that Luttig is still on the short list for nomination to the Supremes, and could indeed find the Boeing interlude helpful and educational. While I believe the latter is possible, the former is just plain "damn" unlikely.
Wow, so you've got proof Harriet Miers is a liberal like Reagan's Kennedy or O'Connor? Where did you publish that, and what is your evidence?
Bush has been doing a tremendous friggin' balancing act ever since 9/11. He's fighting a war, trying to maintain a strong economy and in the meantime deal with other crises--long simmering ones like corporate jackals ignored by Clinton--Enron, for example...and immediate problems like Katrina.
To me, there are huge differences between Republicans and Democrats. I'll take the screwed up Republicans every time over a socialist marxist Democrat.
I haven't exactly said she was a "liberal like Reagan's Kennedy or O'Connor"...in some ways she might have been worse...I suspect she is more like a Souter, but even if she wasn't she is clearly also not a bona fide solid constitutional conservative.
Where were you during the whole brou-ha-ha over her nomination?
Do you remember some of the extraneous things which came to light: Gore supporter. DNC supporter. And this was after her allegedly being "born again" in 1987? Disconcerting with respect to how Rove and the President emphasized her putative "faith"... Maybe ancient history. But the real serious stuff was Meiers judicial philosophy and that was what ultimately blew her away. Meiers also interfered with the Texas Sodomy case...and again, a'hem, screwed it royally. She may well have been the main factor which led Ted Olson to resign from the Solicitor General's Office, having finally gotten fed up with her micro-management and liberal-position-embracing sabotage.
And think back, how much of her advice was relied upon by the President to risk going along with McCain-Feingold's shredding of the Constitution and signing that bill? Or his "good bill" complacency over giant increases in federal encroachment under the Kennedy "compromise" to No Child Left Behind?
With friends like her who needs Fifth Columnists?
What finally blew her out of the water was the discovery of her speech that was transcribed at the Dallas Bar Women's Group in the '90s., wherein she agreed that the penumbral privacy theory underpinning of Roe v. Wade was "likely" legitimate.
Here's a regurgitation of something I posted long ago:
Harriet Meiers was effectively fired for incompetence from under Andrew Card's section due to her inability to let go of issues, delegate them or to make a decision on them either. So the President moved her laterally. They thought the White House Counsel's office would be the perfect fit for this kind of personality. But this was yet another blunder. Harriet Meiers pre-emptively capitulated to and advocated for an over-weening Multiculturalism. E.g., as one anecdotal illustration:
In 2001, Bush's first year in office, Meiers rejected the text of the White House Christmas card and ordered a new version because, the White House said, she did not think it was written well enough.
Now, my first thought after seeing this was, "Wow, up until recently, a nominee for the Supreme Court was proofreading Christmas cards." But as it turned out, however, this little assignment was merely a seminal example of her 'Captain Queeg'-like behavior in a series of flaps for Meiers.
Ned Ryun, son of Rep. Jim Ryun, was the one responsible for that rejected card in 2001. As he tells the story, there was far more to this than bad writing:
"I worked with Miers at the White House. Though my interaction with her was limited, since I was merely a Presidential Writer and she was the Staff Secretary, I had a unique experience with her. In 2001, I was given the task of writing the President's Christmas message to the nation….The director of correspondence and the deputy of correspondence edited and approved the message and it was sent to the Staff Secretary's office for the final vetting. Miers emailed me and told me that the message might offend people of other faiths, i.e., that the message was too Christian. She wanted me to change it.
I refused to change the message (In my poor benighted reasoning, I actually think that Christmas is an overtly Christian holiday that celebrates the birth of Christ and the beginning of the redemption of man.).
The director and deputy of correspondence supported me. I even emailed Ken Mehlman (then the Political Director at the White House, now the Republican National Committee Chairman), to see what he thought about the message. He was not offended by it in the least. Miers insisted that I change the tone of the message. I again refused, and after several weeks, the assignment was taken out of my hands. I was later encouraged to apologize to Miers. I did not apologize.
…Miers purposefully sought to dilute the Christianity of the message, thus revealing to me at least a willingness to compromise unnecessarily without outside pressure. That is my opinion based off that experience and I would be more than happy to be proved wrong.
And frankly, we need to look at the simple facts that Meiers was AWOL where it counted...conservative jurisprudential organizations. As note by Ann Coulter:
"I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush's real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.""First, Bush has no right to say "Trust me." He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years. Among the coalitions that elected Bush are people who have been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. While Bush was still boozing it up in the early '80s, Ed Meese, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and all the founders of the Federalist Society began creating a farm team of massive legal talent on the right.
To casually spurn the people who have been taking slings and arrows all these years and instead reward the former commissioner of the Texas Lottery with a Supreme Court appointment is like pinning a medal of honor on some flunky paper-pusher with a desk job at the Pentagon — or on John Kerry — while ignoring your infantrymen doing the fighting and dying."
Link at: www.anncoulter.com/cgi-local/welcome.cgi
Another factor was Harriet Meiers dramatically inept constitutional understanding which would effectively lead her to be liberally swaying with the wind of public controversy, rather than staunchly relying on the rock of Constitutional principles, E.g., :
MIERS ON THE CONSTITUTION....
On her Senate questionnaire, Harriet Miers only took a single stab at answering one question about her experience with constitutional law — and she blew it: At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued for violating the Voting Rights Act, she said, the council "had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection clause."So much for that famous Meiers "attention to detail" which was ballyhooed by the White House proponents of the nomination. The tell-tale signs of "legal" liberalism were there to see for all those who know who know how to read them. The reaction of the conservative judicial movement was sound. They did not go off half-cocked on this. And it was no small matter.But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said that the Constitution's guarantee of the "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have enough minority members to match the proportion of blacks, Hispanics and Asians in the voting population. ....
Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan...said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers' questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.
"Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking," she said.
Reflect on the implications...Meiers was the one who was really running the legal show for the White House for most of five years...
Your speculation about Olsen is mere rumor, the Gore and DNC stuff was old and looked more like perfunctory politics instead of hard core support. Her speech regarding privacy I can't comment on other than to say I'd like to hear the context.
As for the amount of time you spent on the Christmas card issue, this really seems like much ado about very little. Lawyers pick at stuff like that all the time...its their job. In my business, lawyers are replete and go over every jot and tittle in order to protect the owners/shareholders.
Yes, I know Ann Coulter opposed Miers. She also opposed John Roberts. Good for her.
At any rate, I really see you've got some reasons for thinking Miers was a liberal, but I don't buy them. She also worked with GWB on the War on Terror and helped make sure Bush's nominees to the bench passed muster. Those aren't likely to convince you she's a conservative, but that along with Bush's confidence in her satisfied me...but, in the end, she backed out and we have a very fine justice in Sam Alito. So I'm happy.
Alito and Roberts is a start.
But we're not close to finished yet, however. The Supreme Court is still ruled by unabashed activists. And the Court of Appeals is loaded with their kin. Can you say 9th Circuit?
It's going to be a lengthy process undoing the damage that's been done to constitutional jurisprudence. We need to be tough, and hold steady against political convenience.
And where the White House itself bungles the U.S. position, as it did in the Michigan Law School case (under Meier's micromanagement) or the Texas Sodomy case...we need to speak up. And hold appropriate feet to the fire.
I think the worst way to that is to abandon the Republican party and let Pat Leahy or Ted Kennedy be the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. :)
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