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.
It was hardly "gutsy". She mentioned the RKBA only very quickly among a bunch of other rights listed in the Constitution. It was not by any stretch of the imagination the focus of her comments. Instead, her solution centered around a bunch of it-takes-a-village, Hillary Clinton style nonsense about dealing with what she considered the "root causes" of crime, none of which had anything to do with the lack of availability of guns in the right hands. There was nothing indicating that she was even making a specific response to the gun grabbers at all.
He was boozing it up in the 80's, by his own admission. So was I for that matter. It's not an insult, it's just history.
"It's when those inside the 70 percent get ugly from their disappointment and make silly statements designed to make our President look inept."
Oh, so it's my fault he nominated an unknown crony to the SCOTUS and thereby made himself look inept.
As an aside, please advise me just what "silly" statements I've made that make Bush look inept.
Thank you.
More nonsense. If we listened to your defeatist attitude, Roe v. Wade would never be reversed.
Plenty of bad decisions have been reversed. And it will take more folks like Clarence Thomas, and less like Scalia who is a conservative activist insted of a literalist.
Phew, I appreciate it. I dont mean to be an ass, this subject to me is frustrating on all levels from all sides. At least with you I am not attempting to argue law :0)
All I meant was that Miers may not speak as well as Roberts, who would be hard to beat.
But in her own way, I expect her to aquit herself well. She is a very smart woman.
"You took that position when you lumped the definate no's with the waiting for infos that's how you asserted it."
I took what position when I "lumped the definate no's with the waint for infos that's how you asserted it."
You really need to be more coherent. I'm really struggling to follow your logic. Is it Boolean?
She wasn't luke warm. She was adamantly against him. Now she doesn't like Miers because she ought be like Roberts. I didn't agree with her, but I thought her condemnation of the Roberts choice was genuine. Now I'm not so sure.
I read your response and basically I agree. Any nominee is a gamble, but why not trim the odds as much as possible? Picking a known conservative is less of a gamble than picking someone who has never made her opinion public, or had to fight to defend it.
I understand your position, but I trust Bush to give us a competent true conservative. I think the lack of prior visibility on her part is a shrewd political calculation to outmanuever the Dems. I don't think the Senate is strong enough to approve a Janice Rodgers Brown and BUsh knows it.
But, tagging her as nothing but a crony, demeans her and my President.
All nominees are unproven. He has such a history with her, i do not see how he could be mistaken on her true beliefs. And I don't care what anyone says, a judge's beliefs show themselves in their opinions.
No one can escape who they are.
Like hell. Any clear literalist like Brown would be extreme to them.
They would bolt the gang, and we'd go "nucular".
Nope. The RINOs left that door open for them.
Not to mention the pressure they would get from their constituents.
Oh, yeah, sure, the citizens of Maine will rise up against Snowe and Collins to toss them out of office for opposing JRB.
What IS the color of the sky on your planet?
Arlen Spector had to basically apologize so he could be Chairman again. That happened because of pressure from US.
Yeah, and he's got six more years and probably won't run again. And Specter aint' the problem here anyway.
Those Senators would not be my first choice as foxhole buddies, but they all have one thing in common. They want to get re-elected.
And they are mostly from RINO-prone states.
"Phew, I appreciate it. I dont mean to be an ass, this subject to me is frustrating on all levels from all sides. At least with you I am not attempting to argue law :0)"
Same here. I have a JD myself, but I admit all of the complexity this issue involves has me frustrated from all sides as well. In that, you are not alone.
Bush is not about appearances. By all appearances, the left is afraid of Bush. In this case he has picked a nominee that 1.) is bound to stick with originalist interpretation and application of the Constitution, and 2.) does NOT have a jurist's track record for Nina Totenburger to snarf into her mullet brain.
I hope Totenburger and her ilk choke ten-fold for the grief they handed Clarence Thomas over the "seriousness of the charges." This nomination is just one small part of the choke factor the left is experiencing.
Yes, it was gutsy. She mentioned the Tower sniper. She didn't flinch from demanding that rights be maintained in the face of demands for greater safety.
That's gutsy.
How many black votes would the Republicans pick up after the televised lynching of Brown by the dems? Besides, Clarence Thomas was confirmed by a Democratic Senate.
Now there's a "conservative" Maureen Dowd.
Is that why Harry Reid likes her so much?
Sorry I have a prblem with writing respoonses as if they were in the same paragraph as to what I am responding to, at the time to me they are coherent and then I post it and sometimes I get lost in my own work. I blame it on carbamazepine.
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