Posted on 10/05/2005 4:03:47 PM PDT by perfect stranger
She's not the nominee.
>>>By me. Miers does not belong on the Supreme Court and President Bush should not have nominated her. AC hits it right on -- too many other people and are far more deserving of the nomination.<<<
I agree that Ann is absolutely correct. Meirs is a lightweight who has no business on the Supreme Court.
LoL.. Borking Ann Coulter is not new..
The RINOs can't help themselves..
At "compassionate conservative cell meetings", she is the name that must not be mentioned.. but alone like on a political forum they are weak and rise up in protest..
Ann Coulter is a Constitutional Lawyer.. Meirs just wears a tie to keep the foreskin down.. like most all lawyers..
AnnCoulterLemming
That much is clear. After all, we keep hearing about penumbras and about the "societal norms" of Europeans, don't we? And those forms of idiocy are usually put forth by an extra-brainy members of the Supreme Court with a degree or two from Harvard who are always considered to be "qualified."
Clearly it is. Don't project your own shortcomings onto others.
Sorry, that's just not good enough. This is a lifetime appointment. There are a plethora of other more qualified candidates. This is not a position that you fill with all of your buddies. Also, this nomination as well as the Roberts nomination sends a very strong message to young conservatives that they can't better not go on record with conservative or originalist beliefs. That's a classic liberal strategy and also a strategy based in weakness. It assumes that an originalist or conservative position can't be defended. We have to send stealth candidates because we don't think we can articulate the reasons we believe as we do.
What we want is for the President to show loyalty to the people who elected him. He campaigned multiple times by saying that he intended to appoint justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. They are originists. Roberts is, at best, a minimalist. And yes, that's a bad thing. It means that when he comes across a precedent that decided wrongly he's liable to reaffirm it simply because he doesn't want all the fuss and bother.
Miers is barely qualified for an Appeals Court nominee and there is zip, zero, nada evidence that she has ANY philosophy of judicial interpretation simply because she's never had to do it before. Justices O'Connor, Souter and Kennedy were selected on the belief (not on any real evidence) that they "held the right views" as is being claimed for Harriet Miers. Ed Meese reassured Senators that Justice O'Connor abhorred abortion. She told Reagan to his face that she did. (Sound familiar???) However, what she didn't have was a consistent philosophy about how the Constitution should be interpreted. She bases her decisions on how she thinks at the moment, rather than from an ordered principled understanding of Constitutional interpretation. What you get then is someone who drifts in their decisions as they "evolve and grow".
If you have any actual evidence other than the testimony of someone's cousin's niece's gardener about how Harriet Miers views Constitutional interpretation, we all wish you'd share. But you don't. Neither does the President. That was proven in his little press conference the other day. In one breath he tries to reassure us that he knows the way Ms. Miers will interpret the Constitution but then in the next denies that he's discussed her views on abortion. Reasonable people would find it hard to believe he discussed her views on Constitutional interpretation and would somehow magically avoid one of the hot button issues of the day. Apparently he thinks we're all as stupid as he has come off seeming to be with this boneheaded nomination.
The Roberts and Miers nominations have continued, and in fact, worsened this tendency of Presidents to put forth nominees with almost non-existent paper trails. What this does is to prevent anyone from making reasoned judgements on their judicial philosophy. That is not an unimportant consideration. The Senate would have been perfectly justified to reject both nominations on that basis alone.
In Judge Roberts case, no one that I'm aware of was claiming that he wasn't qualified to sit on the Court. But, that also isn't the only criterion on which potential nominees should be judged. They should also be judged on their philosophy of interpreting the Constitution. Justice Roberts' record of opinions was too sparse to make that judgement. And the way that the confirmation hearings have evolved, you really don't get much information at all out of the nominee. They fall back on what is now called the Ginsburg standard. It wasn't always that way. As late as the 60's judicial nominees routinely gave answers as to the way they would have decided particular cases.
The way things stand now, we are sending very pointed messages to future judges. They are being shown that, if they want to have any chance at advancing in their profession, they have to be secretive and not give any indications of what their method of judging the law is. This is troubling for many reasons, but two in particular come to mind. We're going to see a dumbing down of the judiciary. The second reason is it implies that originalism (which is different from conservatism in a judge) can't be defended, so we have to hide it. It's another strategy born out of perceived weakness.
If the President can't count on those 7, he cannot get a nominee through. There would be no crossover democrat votes once the squishes defect.
I am certain there are more experienced nominees. What I am pretty sure of is that those nominees couldn't get the vote of the squish GOP senators.
Harriet Miers is the nominee because she has no paper trail, which gives the cowards like Voinovich, Chafee, Snowe, Collins, Spector, et al enough cover to vote for her.
I do not like the situation, but to hold the President solely responsible for the situation is to give all of those RINO's a pass.
I would like to know why none of the pundits (except for Mark Levin who just had an article posted concerning this issue) have bothered to look into the vote count. The President doesn't make a nomination in a vacuum, after all.
You've like all of Bush's previous nominations until now. Miers helped him pick them. Why why why would you think they are trying to pull a fast one on you now?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.