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.
What is the relevance of that comment? Ann is not a Supreme Court nominee.
Boob job?
Yes, the boob bone's connected to the brain bone . . .
I now pronounce you a true member of the FR brotherhood, not a political hack of any party.
I said it was lame. I never said it was out of line.
Hopefully the nomination would die in the Senate. If not, say hello to Justice Lanny Davis. If Kerry had been elected, this nomination would be Lawrence Tribe. I'd rather have Lanny.
Bush promised us a strict constructionist, and you have yet to find out if she would be a Scalia or a Thomas, heck we really didnt know if Scalia or Thomas would be what they are today until they got put on the bench and got some time.
Yes, we are supposed to be better than DU.
DU are the type of people that accepted whatever clinton did because he had a D next to his name.
We're supposed to be better than that. We should be able to evaluate the individual merits of an action, and use our principles to decide whether it is good or bad. Not party loyatly.
That is what we should aspire to. That is what many here condemn. Failure to tow the party line gets you called a traitor or worse.
Just look at this thread for examples.
No need to attack her personality. Her delusional state is fair game, however:
...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
Miz Kolter is still trying to change field but she should go back and read Roe; Roe v. Wade didn't legalize abortion as she and her harpies rail. Roe v. Wade did rule that one cannot make choice illegal.
As a lawyer she must know that but I understand she has some difficulty with logic which is why she couldn't litigate her way out of a book signing.
See...thats the problem...there are no facts. We just have to take Bush's word for it. I'm done doing that...I want proof.
***********
Perhaps Ann didn't go to the right schools?
ROFLMAO
Actually, she's starting to remind me of the Dowdy one.
LOL
Ann, stop it. You're making a fool of yourself.
Bush freely admits he was a party boy back in the '80s, before he turned his life around. Sometimes the truth hurts, but that's no reason to suppress it.>>>
You coulter-bots are sickening. The one and only reason she brought that up wasnt to enlighten us to a bit about Bush past we didnt know, it was so she could turn the knife she put in Bush's back a little.
Pretty spot on !
I've been flipping the channels all day and there is a theme from both the wacked out right and wacked out left that if you're not from their club you can't play in their playhouse !
Not to mention the same "boozing it up" knocks.
Taking that high-road, I could mention that Miers was a respected attorney when Ann was bedding her professors for improved grades.
The truth is that I really like Ann's writing and debating, but on the subject of Roberts and now Miers, she is in the same boat with all the other conservatives that can't be happy when they win.
With Roberts she complained that he was not a guaranteed Conservative vote on the court. Now Miers -- picked the justices Bush nominated which Ann liked so much -- just doesn't have a sufficient pedigree for her so it doesn't matter if she is a yes-machine for Conservatism (which I don't think is true anymore than that she is the next Souter).
"Bush promised us a strict constructionist, and you have yet to find out if she would be a Scalia or a Thomas"
THAT is exactly the problem.
And that is what some people still don't get.
We had dozens of people who we knew what they believed based on their public record. Instead of asking why those people weren't nominated, all I've been seeing is excuses (oh, the RINOs in the senate would betray us) and attacks (GO BACK TO DU! I TRUST THE PRESIDENT YOU TROLL!)
Personal attacks such as walking into a religious meeting and declaring that the group's leaders were a "brood of vipers"?
Or was that "not Christian"?
Sometimes one is speaking the truth.
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