I think this withdrawal injures the president. He is obviously weakened.
It will affect whom he can nominate to SCOTUS. (See post #823)
I'm thinking there will be no Fitzpatrick indictments at all. That's my hope. However, if there are, then the President is even more injured.
This is really negative stuff to have happening when we should already be targeting democratic senate seats in the mid-term elections.
Yep.
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This is really negative stuff to have happening when we should already be targeting democratic senate seats in the mid-term elections.<<
Whats the point of having a majority when we sell out our beliefs to win? Thats the whole problem with all politicans, if they have they have the option to win, but they have to give up everything they believe in, they'd take it.
Yes, the nomination has injured Bush, first because it revealed that he was unwilling to fight the Senate for a strong candidate and second because it failed.
But if he had not allowed the nomination to be withdrawn, he would have been injured a lot more, indeed would have rendered himself politically dead. And if by disastrous fortune Miers had been confirmed, by a plurality of RINOs and Democrats, he would have been even worse off, because she would have been making a spectacle of herself on the Court for the remaining three years of his term in office, keeping all of yesterday's resentments alive and growing.
I think it needs to be pointed out that he inflicted this injury on himself, by nominating someone who was barely vetted at all. It is obvious that no one in the White House had the faintest notion of what she had written and said in her years with the ABA. Now hopefully he can pull up his socks, as he has often done before, and go into battle for a really stellar candidate.
He was weak to begin with. He did this entirely to himself.
Bush had an opportunity to follow up John Roberts with another home run. At school, when we were talking about this news soon after it broke, the unanimous opinion was that Roberts, while conservative, was a scholar of impeccable ability. No one thought he didn't deserve to sit on the Supreme Court bench.
Instead, he picked Miers - a woman we know nothing about. Where Roberts was cool and articulate on Constitutional law matters, Miers showed ignorance. During Robert's confirmation proceedings, he showed a firm grasp of Constitutional law. No one - even my most liberal friends - could deny he know what he was talking about. Miers showed no such command. What glimpses we had - and they were preciously scant - suggested she might just be out of her league.
And then, when Bush found that this nomination wasn't the bone to his base that he thought it was, he tried to pander, and it backfired tremendously. I was insulted by the whispering campaign that Rove tried with Dobson, trying to surriptitiously assure him that, "Psst. She's an Evangelical. Read between the lines." Unabashed pandering. I voted against Kerry because, even when he was right, he was clearly pandering to tell people what they wanted to hear. Bush fell into the exact same trap.
What does Bush need to do now? Pick another John Roberts - not a firebrand ideologue like Luttig or Janice Rogers Brown. He just doesn't have the political weight to push around to get that done. Rather, he needs to find someone who clearly knows what he is talking about. The person needs to be conservative, qualified, and confirmable.
The other thing Bush needs to do is end this affirmative action hiring crap. It shouldn't matter whether the nominee is a woman, Hispanic, or any other group he wishes to pander to. Pick a person based off of their knowledge of Constitutional Law and their judicial temperment, not their heritage or gender. Enough of the focus group pandering.