I was wrong; so please join me in supporting Harriet Miers.

[Keith in Iowa]

>>>Oh wait, that's infantile. Not posting an opus 3 days ago, not leaving, and then announcing in news / activism that you're back.

Infantile is persisting in this incessant whine. Enough already.

[Principled]

This poster has a long history of instgating pissing matches. It's what it wants.

[Verginius Rufus]

Who can say how long Harriet Miers will live? Pope Leo XIII was 68 when he was elected, and he reigned 25 years (1878-1903). Harriet's mother is alive at 93; her father died at the age of 68. If you take the average of those ages, she should make it to at least 80. Bush thinks she'll be around for another 20 years...maybe she made a personal promise to him.

[Owen]

You're wrong. Pot smoking was not the universal norm of the era and was not any sort of badge of respectability -- and I will have to point out that those who refrained would take solid offense at your suggestion that their choice makes them ill-qualified for adult life today in a leadership role.

FYI, back in the day Air Force officer candidates were explicitly asked this question and if the answer was yes, they were shown the door. I suppose military officers charged with the safekeeping and use of nuclear weapons in some way don't qualify for your worldview of today's leadership, but fortunately you are in charge of pretty much nothing.

Okay, I'll tone down the close here. I type thoughtless stuff now and then too in a fit of humor, but guy, you are way, way out of line on this.

[counterpunch]

Does the fact that Sen. Feinstein (D-California) carries also make her a strong supporter of the 2nd?

ooooh!!! Face!!!!

[little jeremiah]

For your consideration, comments welcome.

[conservativebabe]

Unbelievably twisted way of turning this around. I said you could have made your point in your first post. It's nothing to do with "audacity" it's all to do with beating a dead horse.

I'm done with this.

[A Jovial Cad]

Yeah, it's all pretty much crap. But the imperative operating premise behind it, one suspects, has nothing to do with the SCOTUS nomination: it's all about getting back into "good graces" with the "cool kids."

[Cold Heat]

Well said Dog....

Pretty good summation of the Senate reality at present.

I might add that it will get worse as we near 2008. Looks to me like many Senators will be looking at a presidential run and the republicans will position against Bush and the admin's prosecution of the war to generate more democrat support. they automatically write off some of the right wing to do this and have hopes of picking up the Buchannonites and Libertarians to make up the difference....

This is the same strategy used on many a lame duck and it sometimes works.

As to Meirs, I might add that ideologue candidates have let us down a dozen times. Their very nature causes them to use something called personal beliefs to make decisions and personal beliefs change. They change a lot.

This is why Bush kept emphasizing how solid she is and that she will not let us down.

I for one believe him. He has always made good judgment calls on things that I care about.

Putting that aside, I fully expect her future judicial temperament to be displayed at the the hearings, along with a knowledge of the constitution and the courts.

If for some reason I don't see this, and I can't imagine why that would be, I will share those concerns, if they occur.

To sum up, you are right Dog....These are perilous times and it is our fault that these republican Senators do this crap and can get away with it.

Our coalition is just as scattered brained as they are, pulling in different directions, acting like children. It is therefore not surprising that they can ignore a chunk of it and still get relelected or even run for higher office.

Our coalition has no core any longer and is not even trustworthy to balance a budget or reform social security, immigration, or anything else at present. It certainly cannot protect States rights.

It allows petty issues to divide it while the democrats just watch and encourage it from time to time.

Never gonna win battle that way....and that's why we have not won and will not win anymore battles during this remaining term.

We will be lucky if Congress does not yank funding for Iraq.

They are already threatening to do just that and those are republicans making the threats.

Glad to see you are back in harness!

[Cincinna]

I am not a secret source in DC but I have been saying this from day 1.
It is the only logical explanation.
Luttig, Brown & co. are wonderful in the abstract. but that matters little if they could not be confirmed.
I stand by my original comment that none of the others could get 51 votes even if by some miracle, they got out of Committee.
With the squishy Republican Senate and an ineffective and super squishy Frist, the Dems would have won big time.

"Harriet Miers stands as the only nominee on Bush’s list which has any chance of confirmation by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The reasons for this are numerous, and would be embarrassing to the Conservative movement should one or many of the ‘stars’ who we hoped Bush would select be shot down in Committee, which again, if true, would be a certainty. "

"Luttig, McConnell, JRB, Owen, Alito, or anyone else you want to name, would have been defeated, and probably defeated in committee, in order to save other Senators from having to vote them down on the floor. Of this, I am now convinced. Only two names were considered allowable for Senate confirmation; Miers and Gonzales."

[pollyannaish]

Well...that is stretching it.

I think if you said out whine, scream and cry hysterically to a willing media, I would agree with you.

[eleni121]

The President has the right stuff but sadly there are Senate Republicans who do not. You have named some of them. There are more.

He would not have gotten the conservatives with the judicial record confirmed. Roberts was fortunate enough to not have a record since he was not confirmed when Bush senior nominated him. That was fortuitous.

This is the result...it could have been far worse.

[conservativebabe]

Geez. Some people must be really bored.

[flashbunny]

awww.

Yes, daring to question another poster or what the administration is 'starting a pissing match'.

I guess discussion boards are only for when you want to agree with someone.

[Edit35]

This post makes a lot of sense, and most of the information provided in it is very logical and likely true.

Man, what a frustrating situation.

As someone from Pennsylvania, I still have a bitter taste in my mouth because of Spector's re-election in 2004.

Things like this are the reason I would never survive in politics. It would be too tempting to rat out all the wimps, and thus lose support from the party bosses.

[TheForceOfOne]

I agree, and I would also ask those so vehemently opposed to her to present a list of judicial appointments where the president has let us down in the past. He chose her after calculating all factors involved including the Republicans in Congress. This isn't a case of scratching the back of a close friend. As far as I can tell he has picked conservatives to date.

How will it all turn out? only time will tell.

From Thomas Sowell.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1498234/posts

When it comes to taking on a tough fight with the Senate Democrats over judicial nominations, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist doesn't really have a majority to lead. Before the President nominated anybody, before he even took the oath of office for his second term, Senator Arlen Specter was already warning him not to nominate anyone who would rile up the Senate. Later, Senator John Warner issued a similar warning. It sounded like a familiar Republican strategy of preemptive surrender.

Before we can judge how the President played his hand, we have to consider what kind of hand he had to play. It was a weak hand -- and the weakness was in the Republican Senators. Does this mean that Harriet Miers will not be a good Supreme Court justice if she is confirmed? It is hard to imagine her being worse than Sandra Day O'Connor -- or even as bad.

[Miss Marple]

His disloyalty NOW makes him suspect. However, he was quite conciliatory during the 2004 elections.

[Torie]

No, silence is what is appropriate, unless the sources are reliable, verified, and corroborated, and then you make a post that this is a possibility. In any event, I cannot believe that the other 7 or 8 who are viewed as highly qualified, all have skeletons in their closet, and/or six Pubbie senators told Bush they would oppose them all, period, for ideological reasons. I just don't. And I don't believe that you got such a leak out of the tight lipped Bush white house from any creditable source. I just don't believe that either.

[af_vet_1981]

So, what’s the bottom line?

We need to replace current Democrat and RINO Senators with real conservatives.

[Cicero]

Specter has built his whole career on lies. What else could you expect from him?

I assume he promised Rove that he would help Bush take Ohio in return for their crucial support in the primary, but after he was nominated he had campaign literature printed up urging his constituents to vote for Kerry/Specter.

It was obvious even to a political amateur like me that it would have been far easier to deny him the chair of the Judicial Committee from the start than it would be to get him out of it, once he was in, and that has certainly proven to be the case.

I'm not blaming any of this on you, as your temperate reply to my earlier post suggests you recognize. It's just a very sad business. It's also sad that many Freepers responding to your admirable post seem to take it as a vindication of Miers. Far from it. It suggests that she is a Gonzalez clone who was OKed by the Democrat leadership. The only hope I see there is that she does not appear to be anything like as weak as Gonzalez, from what little we know of her.

So, perhaps given Bush's weakness on the arm-twisting front--or, rather, his tendency to twist the arms of his political allies rather than those of his enemies--Miers is now indeed the best we can hope for.