I'm sure Ms. Miers is a fine woman, hard working and decent lawyer. If her nomination was to a lower court that would be fine. Her nomination to the Supreme Court is like a little league baseball player being elected to the MLB Hall of Fame without any high school, college, minor or major league baseball experience.
This is news/activism or vanity forum material?
Brown and Owens need more time on the bench and Miers hasn't even been on the bench. ???
I am suspecting Bush knows what he's doing and we'll probably like her but he could have appointed someone with no doubt at all.
What this nomination shows is that President Bush is very much a maverick.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
ajolympian2004's comments, while apt, and I agree with, may be less important than we think.
Does it really matter if Miers is not as "brilliant" as Scalia so long as she votes with him? And maybe Scalia would be better off if he used his brains to figure out ways to make conservative coalitions win, rather than be stuck writing "brilliant" dissents.
I think we who have worked so hard since the mid 60's to stop the liberalization of our culture are bitter. But I feel that Rush, Levin and now Geo. Will have sent a strong shot to the moderate Republicans that we are p.o.'d.
It is now time to rally behind GWB. I asked myself last night if there was something better or a place I could go in the short term. There isn't. So I am left, sadly, with hoping - not trusting - Ms. Miers works out OK. She has been nominated. Nothing I can do will change that.
To keep dragging on my complaining only weakens GWB, our chances in 2006 and 2008, honestly.
After many hoursd of thourough research on Miers, i have come to believe she is a wonderful candidate. Although she lacks credentials that some believe are a necessity, I have very little doubt she will not stray from the voting patterns of Scalia and Thomas, something I can't trust Roberts on. I have found articles from long before she was nominated showing that she is personally pro-life and sensible. Although I wish Bush nominated two justices as qualified as Roberts and as Conservative as Miers, I believes Miers lack of trail is a blessing. I mean, despite what some of us think, Rogers brown would get zero Democratic votes, and would test many RINO's support of her. If she was Bork'ed, we may as well put a bullet in any President ever nominating a JRB candidate ever again, so why nominate Janice in harsh times when we can put Miers, as good as Janice, on now
Hopefully it will be Miers that ends up voting to make the government enforce the borders while Bush is still president. Wouldn't that be an interesting twist of fate?
Ironically Bush who is portrayed as a right winger, as a religious zealot, as some war mongering animal in the MSM is in reality a "moderate". Many of his nominations and positions on issues are quiet "middle of the road".
Being more on the right edge myself, I too feel like he betrayed the base which insured his reelection. Those hundreds of thousands who rallied behind him, the real "silent majority" of America which is conservative in values, hardly appreciate his watered down stance on many issues. He won with a mandate by the people based on certain values he said he had. He presented himself as a "conservative" and the fact that the MSM set him in the right wing corner did not stop his reelection. There is a reason why he got reelected! America IS a conservative nation. President Bush, it’s time to deliver!
Set a conservative in the supreme court!
Seal up the boarder.
Stop the murder of people through the removal of feeding tubes.
Don’t try to make a mark in history! Don’t chase some dream of being “liked”. Piss people off and do that which “the people” who voted for you want you to do. What the small loud mouths out there scream is inconsequential. They are the minority and didn’t vote for you anyway. You are loosing your base. If you want to go down as a mediocre President, continue to pander to those liberals in government.
Red6
Why not post your vanity on your own blog?
I tend to be a staunch supporter of President Bush myself and don't need to check in with the likes of Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh to form my views. However the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is probably one of the most disappointing things Bush has done. It was a safe political play that avoided a necessary confrontation with the left in this country. Since Woodrow Wilson the left in this country have been systematically trying to seize the judicial system. And Bush kind of caved in to them by appointing a moderate. Bush is loyal to people who are loyal to him to a fault. And in truth Bush in many ways has only himself to blame for his faltering poll numbers. Bush needs to revamp his communications team. They have done an awful job and did throughout the campaign last year. Bush also needs to be proactive in terms of addressing the media and have more press conferences. Lastly I wish Bush would use his veto and put the screws to Congress for reckless spending, which has reached new heights during his administration.
Admin Moderator, if you can move this post to a vanity post, please feel free to do so.
Not all the critics are congenital Bush bashers by any means. Personally, I'm willing to excuse Bush for having to compromise about minor matters, and save his political capital for the most critical decisions.
There is nothing more critical than Supreme Court nominations, however. It's not that Miers necessarily a bad choice. It's just that there are so many better known candidates to choose from. The fact that she's an Evangelical may save Bush from an Evangelical revolt at the midterm election, which I had feared if he made a poor nomination, but it certainly has disappointed a fair number of people who hoped and trusted that Bush would do the right thing.
How can you argue that those two don't have enough seasoning at the same ime you say it's okay that Niers was never a judge?
Big Steve, you sure use a lot of words to say basically nothing. Here's a few words that say something:
President chose a cipher and a crony. We should lobby Republican Senators to vote her down, so that President Bush will nominate a proven constitutionalist. We might not get another opportunity to change the complexion of the Supreme Court for a while. Stevens ain't leavin' until he dies, and that might be at age 95.
O'Conner can be encourgaged to leave in the meantime, before a new nominee is appointed. With her gone, the balance of the court will shift marginally to the right.
The fact that we are still talking about this and groping is a sign that all is not well to say the least.
Here is something I posted on a thread about the Will article, and he places a lot of emphasis on McCain FeinGold/Campaign finance reform (CFR):
CFR is truly an abomination...Will is dead on here. In fact, I have heard some argue that a Pres who signs a bill he believes to be unconstitutional is (hypothetically, obviously) worthy of impeachment for knowingly violating the oath. Not a bad point if you think about it (but again purely hypothetical).
Now...that said...let me try to bring some balance to this because these threads are descending to the level of the evolution/creation threads (you're an idiot, no you're an idiot).
Here is what we know.
First, to say that Bush is not a domestic conservative is a huge understatement. He has in fact presided over and supported and pushed through some of the worst measures in 30 or 40 years, including prescription drugs and McCain Feingold. Let's don't even get started borders, and the "assault weapons" ban. This is obviously a huge source of distrust for conservatives and moderates even. They simply don't trust him to do what is right. That mistrust (which GWB and Rove have earned) spills over into this appointment, which is the most important domestic act yet (even more so than the Chief...where we could only lose ground...here we can gain).
So in that context of mistrust, he give us a nominee that he and only he knows. If the political guys in the White House are as smart as they tell us, they should have seen that this would create a firestorm. Which it has. And it's not just the cranks like people here at FR. It includes Will, David Frum, Ann Coulter, and Rush (to varying degrees). The Fed Soc., ACLJ and Dobson have chimed in positively.
And I am certainly in the mistrust camp.
But let's take a step back and try to match apples with apples. It is true that Bush is a disaster on the domestic front generally. BUT..he has had some outstanding Court of Appeals appointments. Anyone that appoints Michael McConnell has a good judicial screening team. And he stood by those that were filibustered and eventually got folks like Owen into their seat. That took a bit of grit. Why he's not always like that on the domesic front, I have no idea, but he has done really well on C of A. In fact, I think his C of A appointments will rival Reagan's (not that this will get a lot of coverage).
And we would all probably agree that his personnel in his administration is damn fine.
So...matching apples to apples....there is hope to think that while this choice is hardly awe-inspiring, it might in fact turn out to be a reliable vote. She probably will not be a Scalia or a Thomas...but you know what? She can hire those clerks to make her look like a Scalia or a Thomas. I remember right after Thomas went out, he actually hired some old Scalia clerks. That had to give Scalia some confidence that he was on the right track! If she is not too proud to do that, I suspect we will see some pretty snappy writing out of her.
I too am just shaking my head with this appointment. Another opportunity wasted. But I don't think she is going to be less than a reliable vote.
Nothing can undo what this President has done to the First Amendment.
Nothing short of legislative repeal can undo what he has done with the prescription drugs entitlement.
But again if you put oranges next to oranges, and apples next to apples, I think you can conclude rationally Miers will be a solid vote.
God I hope so.
In the past 25 years, only one of the four stealth candidates appointed by Republican presidents ended up being a conservative originalist.
Why should we except the direction of the court change when the same failed strategy is being used once again, this despite having 55 Republican seats in the Senate?
Flashback to 1981:
United Press International
July 8, 1981, Wednesday, AM cycle
SECTION: Washington News
BYLINE: By WESLEY G. PIPPERT
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
In Texas, television evangelist James Robison expressed his support for Mrs. [Sandra Day] O'Connor based on a conversation Tuesday with presidential counselor Edwin Meese.
A Robison aide said Meese told the evangelist:
''Sandra O'Connor thinks abortion is abhorrent and is not in favor of it. She agrees with the president on abortion. There was a time when she was sympathetic toward the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) movement, but the more she studied and found out about it, the more she changed her mind.
''She is very conservative ... Sandra O'Connor assured the president that she was in agreement with him and she totally supports pro-family issues and the Republican platform.''