Posted on 10/10/2005 2:59:18 PM PDT by quidnunc
I suspect that President Bush was shocked to find such an uprising against his choice for a Supreme Court nominee. Why? Because it is coming not from the Liberal Left, but rather from his own base. Even George Will ran an opposition piece against Harriet Miers.
Conservatives have complained, in the past, about the elitists in the Democrat party as being the most liberal group and seemingly in a consistent state of launching snob attacks at everything this “cowboy” (as they call him) does.
I think that the Conservative-Republican cause also has its own share of these elitists, those who look down their noses at anyone who does not graduate from Harvard or Yale or even Stanford. …
-snip-
My personal views:
1. President Bush has "lived” with this woman for many years and knows her heart and soul. She helped him find Judge Roberts and the others potential candidates, so she knows what is needed to save this country and he knows this! No other president has ever been associated for so long or worked so closely with a Supreme Court nominee, so the fact that other presidents have been fooled by past selections does not mean that this can happen to this president!.
2. It is bad enough having the Democrats and fellow Leftists against us; we don't need Republicans, too.
3. It is not as if Bush carried a mandate when elected. There are still letters to the editor claiming that either Gore or Kerry really won the presidency, the latter by a bad vote count in Ohio. The media is trying daily to smear the President or his administration.
4. We don't need a long drawn-out battle in Congress right now with a possible filibuster, especially with all the problems raised by the Democrats and the biased media re Iraq, Katrina, the budget deficit, et al.
5. The President may have to appoint two more Supreme Court judges before his term expires, so there is still an opportunity to put up controversial conservatives for the Supreme Court and have the time to wage war against the Socialists in Congress.
6. We lost one election to William Jefferson Clinton because too many Republicans were mad at Bush Sr. including me, and so we voted for Perot. As a result, we had Clinton for 8 years. Let's not make that error again. Do you really want eight years of Hillary and her court nominees?
7. Did the Democrats condemn Clinton when he was impeached? No! They blamed everything on those “mean nasty Republicans” who thought that having sex with a young intern in the Oval Office during business was bad. Some Republicans joined the Democrats. Do the Republicans constantly back President Bush? No! If he is not 100% perfect, we want to punish him. Even 90% perfect is not good enough.
8. No baseball team could win a game if the team was run by what the fans in the park demanded instead of what the coach saw as a winner. Nor, could employees successfully run a corporation if the CEO had to follow their rules rather than what he (or she) knew best. We elected a boss. Back him. The next time, we had better get a stronger mandate (more voters) if we are to obtain an even stronger hold over Congress in 06 and 08!
-snip-
Didn't need one IMO
Don't understand ludicrous?
Non responsive. That's the report I'd previously read, which doesn't say she actually carried, only that her brother gave her the handgun.
To be taken seriously it did.
Maybe by a BushBot ... not by me
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.That piece chooses -one- bottom line. The performance of the nominee. It ignores the political fallout resulting from making a timid pick and avoiding confrontation with some serious government dysfunction between the Senate and the President when it comes to nominations.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.
The very fact that Harriet Miers is a member of an evangelical church suggests that she is not dying to be accepted by the beautiful people, and is unlikely to sell out the Constitution of the United States in order to be the toast of Georgetown cocktail parties or praised in the New York Times. Considering some of the turkeys that Republicans have put on the Supreme Court in the past, she could be a big improvement.
We don't know. But President Bush says he has known Harriet Miers long enough that he feels sure.
For the rest of us, she is a stealth nominee. Not since The Invisible Man has there been so much stealth.
That's not ideal by a long shot. But ideal was probably never in the cards, given the weak sisters among the Republicans' Senate "majority." ...
The bottom line with any Supreme Court justice is how they vote on the issues before the High Court. It would be nice to have someone with ringing rhetoric and dazzling intellectual firepower. But the bottom line is how they vote. If the President is right about Harriet Miers, she may be the best choice he could make under the circumstances.
http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/thomassowell/2005/10/07/159683.html
The piece is also conditional, -IF- the President is right, says Sowell. I missed the part where he said she should be supported. Can you provide a quotation and cite to support your "Thomas Sowell also says she should be supported." assertion? I take the piece as basically explaining how a timid pick might be justified.
Ignoring the UN and invading Iraq took a little backbone.
He's known her a long time...I assume he is right about her.
Unless you think he's a moron like Maureen Dowd does.
I have my own reservations about this appoinment. But, I also believe that White House counted noses on the committee and in the Senate as a whole and decided they would lose the fight if the put up someone with a proved record of conservatism.
I also believe that if we had picked the fight and "gone nuclear" we would have lost. Maybe we would not have lost that specific vote, but many, many subsequent elections. I do not believe that the vast majority of of electorate is with "us" in the regard.
Put simply, core conservatives want a fight. The rest of the country doesn't. As a consequence, we don't have one.
There is a universe of other possibilities. Maybe she's fooled him. Maybe his (and her) sense of judicial restraint isn't the same as what constitutionalists pine for. Maybe it is cronyism pure and simple - a reward for loyalty to a person he feels is suitable for the job.
Did you find a quote to support your "Thomas Sowell also says she should be supported." assertion? That was what prompted be to reply to your initial post. I've only read the one Sowell piece I linked above, and he may have called for support in a different writing.
Nothing about Miers and the 2nd-amendment has turned up. I think that nothing will, and I simply have to trust that she'll rule according to her "general judicial philosophy" as a 'Pistol Packin' Mama'.
I posted it.
This letter to the Wall Street Journal incapsulates my feelings on the embarrasingly over-the-top reaction to the Miers nomination.
Its title: Lugubrious Thuggery
From where this grassroots Republican stands, the Miers nomination has shaped up to be the right-wing pundits' Hurricane Katrina: a perfect storm of irresponsible, self-important media jackasses giving voice to their most morbid fantasies instead of covering the news.
The only major difference I see is that instead of the bogeyman being the imaginary gang bangers committing rape, pillage and plunder in the Superdome, it is a stealth, non-Ivy League nominee moving to the left once in office because she can't possibly be strong enough to know either constitutional law or her own mind.
In both cases, the rhetoric says far more about those doing the reporting that it does about the facts in evidence.
What ticks me off the most is that so few of the voices stridently raised in opposition to President Bush have experience managing anything larger than their own mouths. Nor have most ever been held accountable for achieving results as opposed to striking attitudes. And furthermore, most make their living, to some extent, by being controversial.
In addition, I fear far too many conservatives have caught the insidious Clinton disease, that hopelessly immature need for the excitement of the endless campaign. Thus they openly stoke the fires of political strife. While this may elevate their status as commentators and garner them more appearances on obscure cable TV shows, I have not seen evidence it brings about good government. In fact, because it encourages posturing for the cameras by showboating windbags, which in turn alienates that huge segment of the governed in the ideological middle, it almost certainly has the exact opposite effect.
The president has worked with Harriet Miers for years. That counts far more to me than the speculative rantings of the professional chattering class with their Web sites, magazine columns and radio programs.
Count me as one very unhappy reader.
I checked your posting history back to September and didn't see it. The word "Sowell" appears at ...
37 posted on 10/10/2005 6:25:23 PM EDT by ez
but nowhere else in that range of posts by "ez." Did you post it under a different handle perhaps?
I do agree with the sentiment you expresseed in this post ... Good job!!
Next, he needs to appoint a conservative pro-life woman and make the Dem fight her tooth and nail. Make em try to filibuster so the Republicans go apply the nuclear option. PLEASE. The Dems NEED to be nuked.They slammed Bush hard for weeks over Katrina and Iraq until public opinion was poisoned with lies...what's he got to lose, he's not running for reelection!
Nominate whom you said you would, W, and NUKE the Dems if they filibuster.
I think the Miers appointment was a mistake, but there is one sense in which Miers cannot be compared to Souter.
Souter was an unknown not only to the country, but to Bush Sr himself. He was foisted on Bush by the dastardly Warren Rudman, who said "trust me." (And he, a liberal Republican, could be trusted to hand Bush a liberal judge.)
In this case, Miers is an unknown to the country, but is intimately known by Bush. Bush could make the argument that he knows her and her judicial philosophy much better than he would know the philosophy even of someone we think would be very reliable, like Janice Rogers Brown, Priscilla Owens, etc...
In other words, in some respect, Bush may have viewed himself as specifically NOT repeating his father's mistake with Souter, which was that of nominating someone he didn't know at all...
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