Posted on 10/05/2005 4:03:47 PM PDT by perfect stranger
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.
Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney's many virtues – loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture ...
Harriet Miers went to Southern Methodist University Law School, which is not ranked at all by the serious law school reports and ranked No. 52 by US News and World Report. Her greatest legal accomplishment is being the first woman commissioner of the Texas Lottery.
I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that's a good rule of thumb. But not when it comes to the Supreme Court.
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.
Second, even if you take seriously William F. Buckley's line about preferring to be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty, the Supreme Court is not supposed to govern us. Being a Supreme Court justice ought to be a mind-numbingly tedious job suitable only for super-nerds trained in legal reasoning like John Roberts. Being on the Supreme Court isn't like winning a "Best Employee of the Month" award. It's a real job.
One website defending Bush's choice of a graduate from an undistinguished law school complains that Miers' critics "are playing the Democrats' game," claiming that the "GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness." (In the sort of error that results from trying to sound "Ivy League" rather than being clear, that sentence uses the grammatically incorrect "which" instead of "that." Websites defending the academically mediocre would be a lot more convincing without all the grammatical errors.)
Actually, all the intellectual firepower in the law is coming from conservatives right now – and thanks for noticing! Liberals got stuck trying to explain Roe vs. Wade and are still at work 30 years later trying to come up with a good argument.
But the main point is: Au contraire! It is conservatives defending Miers' mediocre resume who are playing the Democrats' game. Contrary to recent practice, the job of being a Supreme Court justice is not to be a philosopher-king. Only someone who buys into the liberals' view of Supreme Court justices as philosopher-kings could hold legal training irrelevant to a job on the Supreme Court.
To be sure, if we were looking for philosopher-kings, an SMU law grad would probably be preferable to a graduate from an elite law school. But if we're looking for lawyers with giant brains to memorize obscure legal cases and to compose clearly reasoned opinions about ERISA pre-emption, the doctrine of equivalents in patent law, limitation of liability in admiralty, and supplemental jurisdiction under Section 1367 – I think we want the nerd from an elite law school. Bush may as well appoint his chauffeur head of NASA as put Miers on the Supreme Court.
Third and finally, some jobs are so dirty, you can only send in someone who has the finely honed hatred of liberals acquired at elite universities to do them. The devil is an abstraction for normal, decent Americans living in the red states. By contrast, at the top universities, you come face to face with the devil every day, and you learn all his little tropes and tricks.
Conservatives from elite schools have already been subjected to liberal blandishments and haven't blinked. These are right-wingers who have fought off the best and the brightest the blue states have to offer. The New York Times isn't going to mau-mau them – as it does intellectual lightweights like Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee – by dangling fawning profiles before them. They aren't waiting for a pat on the head from Nina Totenberg or Linda Greenhouse. To paraphrase Archie Bunker, when you find a conservative from an elite law school, you've really got something.
However nice, helpful, prompt and tidy she is, Harriet Miers isn't qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on "The West Wing," let alone to be a real one. Both Republicans and Democrats should be alarmed that Bush seems to believe his power to appoint judges is absolute. This is what "advice and consent" means.
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?
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