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To: beyond the sea
That's not the point.

Full text of the article which will be here on FR for research purposes a long time after NewsMax takes it down

President Bush should withdraw his nomination of Harrier Miers to fill the Supreme Court seat of retiring justice Sandra Day O'Connor, says Washington Post columnist and Fox News commentator Charles Krauthammer.

In a blistering Post column Friday Krauthammer, normally a strong Bush supporter, wrote that if Miers weren't a Bush crony, "her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her."

Noting that there are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States, Krauthammer asked: "What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvey Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous."

The columnist called the fact that Miers has been chosen by a conservative president "particularly dismaying. For half a century, liberals have corrupted the courts by turning them into an instrument of radical social change on questions – school prayer, abortion, busing, the death penalty – that properly belong to the elected branches of government. Conservatives have opposed this arrogation of the legislative role and called for restoration of the purely interpretive role of the court. To nominate someone whose adult life reveals no record of even participation in debates about constitutional interpretation is an insult to the institution and to that vision of the institution."

Krauthammer predicted that Miers will "surely shine in her Judiciary Committee hearings," but explained that she will do so "only because expectations have been set so low. If she can give a fairly good facsimile of John Roberts's testimony, she'll be considered a surprisingly good witness. But what does she bring to the bench?"

Only, he insists, the fact that, as her supporters say, the nation is at war "and therefore the great issue of our time is the powers of the president, under Article II, to wage war. For four years Miers has been immersed in war-and-peace decisions and therefore will have a deep familiarity with the tough constitutional issues regarding detention, prisoner treatment and war powers."

Be that as it may, and even though we don't know exactly what her role in these decisions was, it could become a liability because in years to come, years Krauthammer called "crucial years in the war on terrorism," Miers will be forced "to recuse herself from judging the constitutionality of these decisions because she will have been a party to having made them in the first place."

As a result, "the Supreme Court will be left with an absent chair on precisely the laws-of-war issues to which she is supposed to bring so much.

"By choosing a nominee suggested by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and well known only to himself, the president has ducked a fight on the most important domestic question dividing liberals from conservatives: the principles by which one should read and interpret the Constitution. For a presidency marked by a courageous willingness to think and do big things, this nomination is a sorry retreat into smallness."


67 posted on 10/08/2005 2:30:18 PM PDT by upchuck (A fireman running up the stairs at the WTC as the towers began to collapse: HERO defined ~ Ben Stein)
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To: upchuck

get a life


198 posted on 10/09/2005 11:14:32 AM PDT by beyond the sea (Doctor, my eyes... tell me what is wrong...was I unwise to leave them open for so long)
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