Krauthammer, you make sense from time to time, but what you just mentioned is exactly the problem with SCOTUS, not the solution. It takes a exercise in intellect to find penumbras where none existed. It takes intellectual honesty and humility to rule that the words of the Constitutuion mean nothing more than what is written.
Otherwise it is nothing but raw politics.
Gawd, Krauthammer, on what planet have you been living? SCOTUS has been the source of the most naked and raw politics ever since judicial activism became fashionable.
It's one thing to argue that there are others more qualified than Miers. It's another to base that premise on supporting the very pathologies that a strict Constructionist will hopefully help cure.
And of course, in failing (along with many of the other consrvative pundits) to defend the President and attack the real source of the problem, Blanco, he aided the trashing of the President by the MSM.
The result of this trashing was lowered approval numbers for the President. With lower approval numbers the squishes in the Senate get weak-kneed. Hence the request by Susan Collins and others for Bush to send them someone who wasn't controversial. The squishes are afraid of the press.
So now, after being part of the media blitz which caused the problem with the Senate, he is now griping because a more famous candidate wasn't nominated. He is griping about this "smallness" of the nomination.
Well, I am griping about the cluelessness and obtuseness of the conservative pundits. Perhaps Mr. Krauthammer can complain about the competence and conservatism of this nomination; I, myself, am going to complain about the competence of a conservative pundit who draws his paycheck from the Washington Post.
I think the application of the word 'penumbra' when 'shadow' would do fine is another indication of the problem, in that the actual amount of intellectual power on display is inordinately lower than the wattage of the vocabulary.
And yet these same conservatives are arguing that for 50 years "intellect steeped in scholarship" has perverted the Founding Document.
If "intellect steeped in scholarship" found a right to kill your baby in the Constitution, then give me farmers and plumbers and yes, church ladies on the Court.
He attacked every single aspect of the memorial.
Sometimes the man is simply way off the mark.
I made the following comment yesterday: "I am of the opinion that what makes judges tack left once appointed is that they come to believe that their intellect is superior to written and stated matters of law. They seek to create profound meaning where none is required or exists."
It seems we are discovering that there are conservative and liberal elitists. The inside the beltway conservatives seem to think a red state conservative lawyer of 30 years expereince isn't smart enough to be a SCJ.
I am not ready to proclaim Ms. Miers is ready to be a SCJ either until we see her respond to questioning, but neither do I dismiss the possibility merely because she went to SMU and not Cornell.