Posted on 10/06/2005 6:25:16 PM PDT by wagglebee
“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”
--Matthew 5:5
And so they have.
A quiet public servant, who has toiled for years in veritable obscurity, immediately calls her pastor and asks him to pray for her. An unassuming Texas lady, who for years went unnoticed and didn’t make anybody’s short or long list, is stepping into the biggest limelight America can offer a legal mind, the Supreme Court.
Her name is Harriet Miers and people like Rush Limbaugh are fuming. The conservative right feels let down. Betrayed!! They are suicidal, depressed, disappointed and “demoralized”. In short, they are steamed. Pat Buchanan goes postal; Bill Kristol, hysterical; Rush Limbaugh, incoherent.
Everybody needs to get a grip. By the time you finish reading this column, you will feel calm and euphoria sweeping over you. You will be shocked and awed by the brilliant leadership President Bush has shown with this selection. You will know the Court will be in the best hands possible. You will love Harriet Miers. You will wish you had put her on the top of your short list. And here’s why:
1. Note the quote beginning this column: The “meek shall inherit the earth.” This is not just some pabulum I dreamed up. This is what Christians actually should believe. This is what Christ taught. Ordinary workers, who labor in the fields of the Lord, shall inherit the kingdom of heaven. And an unpretentious laborer in the fields of the Lord, and the fields of George W. Bush, might just be the best person for the highest court in the land.
Harriet Miers does not just show up at church on Sunday morning; go downstairs for coffee and donuts; check her Christianity at the door and return to bloodbath politics as usual.
She identifies herself as a “born again” Christian. Now, this is an important distinction. People who identify themselves this way are dead serious about their faith. They live it. They love it. And they would probably die for it. Bored, comatose Protestant mainliners and robotic, zombie-like cultural Catholics need not apply for this personal distinction unless they are ready to take the big leap into being born again, or, as we Catholics say, conversion.
As a Catholic myself, of course, I miss her and wish she’d come home to us. I can certainly imagine, though, how it happened, as the Catholic Church took a nosedive into immorality, corruption, relativism and liberalism after Vatican II.
2. Harriet Miers has toiled in obscurity and she is not getting much respect in her own town. People who toil in obscurity usually don’t owe anybody anything. You don’t see them on endless talk shows schlepping their latest book, that is, in actuality, a bloated, overblown magazine article. The D.C. assembly-line cocktail party circuit probably does it without her.
3. Horror of all horrors, liberal elitism has reared its ugly head! She was not born with a silver spoon stuck in her mouth by an Ivy League alumnus with a Harvard education on the end of it. I mean, come on, Ted Kennedy graduated from Harvard. How great can it possibly be?
4. No personal baggage! No, we don’t have to worry about any frat-house, drunken party images showing up on the internet with this Texas lady. Refreshing, isn’t it?
Not much partying for her it seems, except for a few celebrations with her co-workers, who, apparently, adore her.
She spends most of her time at the office. Being single and never married, no unseemly marriage problems, bimbo alerts or embarrassing divorce papers to be splattered all over The Smoking Gun website; no illegal-alien-nanny-gate problems; no grand-children-who-need-bailing-out-of-jail problems, and, living the simple life alone, she probably doesn’t need a cadre of workers from Guatemala to keep up the estate and then not pay their taxes. She seems to have a nice gentleman friend who shows up occasionally, so, a little romance might do the staid Court some good.
5. She is a woman! I think Harry Reid has a crush on her!
Her lack of bench experience is a red herring. Dozens of Justices brought no bench time to the Court, including the late Chief Justice Rehnquist, whose road to the Court also ran the same course through the White House.
Now, let’s pull ourselves together. This great lady presents a clean slate and appears untarnished. Her main drawback being the intellectual conservative cabal didn’t think of her first.
Harriet Miers came creeping in under the radar like a Stealth bomber; a modest, unassuming, hard-working, experienced lawyer with strong moral, religious and constitutional convictions. Just what the boss was looking for.
Let's give her a chance. Bombs away!
....uh...no...
"There is no reason, in my opinion, that Harriet Miers can't be that person."
You don't know that she is, you don't know that she isn't. But I can tell you that she is not even in the top 10,000 conservative legal minds and is too old to be an ideal pick for the purpose of remaking the supreme court.
"However, unlike you, I have not decided whether I support her nomination or not."
Bull. If you are not going to acknowledge that her complete lack of qualifications or ideological clarity is an issue, there is no way vague hearings are going to change your mind.
What hurdles does she need to go through before you can support the President's pick? I have read all criticisms....she's not Brown, She's 60 years old, ABORTION, Cronyism, and on and on.
Not one of the arguments I have read is a disqualifier to keep her off the bench.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/05/politics/politicsspecial1/05miers.html?pagewanted=1&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1128658660-RsEXhUdNHI9M8txEZOI9YA
In Midcareer, a Turn to Faith to Fill a Void
...
Ms. Miers, born Roman Catholic, became an evangelical Christian and began identifying more with Republicans than with the Democrats who had long held sway over Texas politics. She joined the missions committee of her church, which is against legalized abortion, and friends and colleagues say she rarely looked back at her past as a Democrat.
...
Ms. Miers sometimes attended Mass at St. Jude Chapel in downtown Dallas, but before embracing evangelical Protestantism, her experience with religion was lukewarm and her attendance sporadic, Justice Hecht said.
You see, that is precisely the point!
This is-and I think this is in need of further reiteration and ampliflication-the Supreme Court of the United States.
Any nominee to the bench should have a preexisting record that is beyond reproach intellectually, and a corpus of work that speaks for itself.
Whether or not the Democratic obstructionists in the United States Senate-and their febrile allies among doctrinaire leftist interest groups such as the Alliance for Justice and PFAW-will use ideological litmus tests in order to then derail that nomination should not be the animating motive-or even one of several priorities-of the president who chose that person.
The battle should be between those, like Kennedy and Schumer and all of their detestable fellow travelers, who do not believe in the Constitution, and those, like Kyl, Sessions and our fellow Constitutionalists, who do.
I think that the notion of a "stealth" nomination-any nomination, at any time-should be rejected as a matter of principle, but to ask conservatives-or any other segment of the American public, for that matter-to accept a "stealth" nominee who has no assets to speak of-other than than the fact that she has left no tangible evidence of her political or judicial philosophy-is simply unacceptable.
Do you think Limp Frist is going to go nuclear to get a hard-liner in? Ginsburg is sick and Stevens damn near fell down the steps and would have if CJ Roberts hadn't propped him up. His days are numbered and will provide the next opening.
(INSERT YOUR NOMINEE HERE) is on the bench at least all the A-list that I have seen, maybe some were comfortable where they are at and are waiting for Teddy K. to have a stroke before entering the crucible. We simply don't know, but second guessing gets us nowhere.
Miers is still the nominee...nothing will change that. Unless there is a major FUBAR incident, she will be the next AJ on the court. I think she's got the backbone of Thomas without the conflicting nature of Scalia, and a fine choice.
The hearings will only confirm what I already see. She's "In Like Flint" (to borrow a movie title).
I'm not damning anybody. I'm saying that we have a plethora of known superstar judges, and the Miers nomination represents a missed opportunity to get one of them on the Supreme Court. Maybe Miers is as good as Kozinski would have been... but I seriously doubt it, for the simple reason that I believe that Kozinski is very nearly the best pick possible, and statistically speaking Miers is highly unlikely to be as good as him. Or Luttig. Or Brown. Or Alioto. Or McConnell.
There were similar "concerns" about Justice Thomas by some, when he was nominated by "41" (he was a "token", and worse). He is an excellent SCJ.
Indeed. Not just an excellent Justice, but IMHO probably the best Justice on the current Court. Certainly better than Stevens, Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and O'Connor, better even than Scalia. The only reason I qualify the award with "probably" is that Roberts remains a mostly unknown quantity.
I was wrong about him, I admit it. In fact, I even wrote him a letter of apology... I opposed his nomination because of what seemed to be obvious racial bias in his selection. I am more thrilled than I can say that I was wrong. I hope I'm as wrong about Miers.
After all, [the founding fathers] are the ones who gave the president the power to select the judges. You are now saying that doesn't matter to you, you have no faith in who the people elected, you seem to want a do over.
Exactly the same logic could be used to prove that Ruth Bader Ginsberg was an excellent choice. After all, who are we to doubt the founding fathers by questioning the President's supernatural power to always select the best nominee?
If you don't like the system, work the change it.
I like the system just fine. The President should pick the Justices. This does not mean that he is insulated from criticism when he makes a bad choice.
What I have decided, is that those who are damning her before they even know her, are irrelevant to the discussion.
However good she is, I find it extremely unlikely that she is the best possible pick. I'd put money on it, if there were a way to do so.
Those who are biased one way or another, are doing a disservice to our President, our country
So, uh, when is it okay to say, "Any of [insert handful of prospects] would have been better?"
and most certainly to the Republican party.
I've heard this before. My loyalty is not to the Republican Party, my loyalty is to the Constitution of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. I consider it a benefit when good laws are passed, when good executive decisions are made, and when good judicial rulings are handed down. I do not consider it a benefit simply when the people making passing those laws, making those decisions, and deciding those cases happen to have the letter R next to their names. The GOP is the means to an end, and when the GOP fails to work towards that end, it'll hear about it from me... and it'll deserve neither my loyalty nor my vote.
Check this out... breaking news from Washington Post:
"Leahy asked her to name her favorite Supreme Court justices. Miers responded with "Warren" -- which led Leahy to ask her whether she meant former Chief Justice Earl Warren, a liberal icon, or former Chief Justice Warren Burger, a conservative who voted for Roe v. Wade . Miers said she meant Warren Burger, the sources said."
Don't you get it? I don't want the President to pick a nominee whose main qualification is that she lacks disqualifications. I want him to pick the best, the brightest, the strongest, the most articulate, the most Constitution-respecting people in the country. The burden is not on me to find reasons Miers shouldn't be a Justice, the burden is on her supporters to prove that she is the best, the brightest, the strongest, the most articulate, the most Constitution-respecting. And "trust the President" doesn't meet that burden.
55 Republicans in the Senate; this is about as strong as the GOP is ever likely to get. The President should've picked one of our superstars. If the Democrats want to filibuster, let 'em filibuster. If the nominee is plainly qualified and it's obvious to all that they're obstructing purely for political reasons, they'd pay a political price. And then we'd have the option of either going nuclear, or withdrawing the nomination and then putting forward somebody like Miers. In that scenario, there's very little to lose, and very much to gain.
I'm sorry; I don't read "group replies." I've got better things to do than scan through your posts to see if you replied to me.
Well, that's just great. Not that I necessarily trust the WaPo to get it right or Leahy to tell the truth, but I don't see how anybody could call Warren frickin' Burger her favorite Justice. It'd be like calling Benjamin Harrison your favorite President. Can anybody name a famous opinion written by Burger?
Scalia is brilliant...ooh, but so divisive!
The fact of the matter is that you are not going to change the minds of someone who's spent the better part of his or her life constructing an elaborate perspective-with regard to interpretation of Constitutional, common and case law-to reflect your opinion more closely, no matter what polemical skills you possess.
The Supreme Court is not a forensics society, where the erudition or incisive reasoning of one member entitles him or her to more authority than the vapidity of another.
If this were the case, then Antonin Scalia's opinion would carry twenty times more weight-at the very least-than that of the doltish Stephen Breyer.
Unfortunately, that's not the reality we're presented with.
We should-and I believe that we have-convince the American public of the rightness of our views, but the only way of enacting them on a national level is by replacing-not convincing-Supreme Court justices with intractable anti or extra-constitional bents.
In any case, the idea that Miers-through either her blandness or collegiality-will persuade the Court's other members to move in the direction of Scalia or Thomas-presuming of course that she is even on their side in the first place-has not been born out by history.
Case in point, the dreadful tenure of Justice Burger.
I see. So, considering that the post of mine that you replied to that I replied to was itself a group reply, you do not speak the truth. And it's a shame that you're so narcissistic that you only consider direct replies to you worth reading.
I'll assuage your laziness by noting that my reply to you was the very first element in that post.
Aye if she were that good an advisor, surely she could have come up with one better candidate than herself.
Every? ... Some words apparently don't mean what they used to mean.
:0)
I have posted many posts on this thread why I support Miers, you clearly chose to ignore them as well as the other posts which support her. I have listened to others who also have valid points for her support, but I don't know where to send you for those interviews...I will let you do your own research.
Well, it wasn't your choice to make or mine. A clear majority elected Bush to make that decision. I can support the President, and you are free not to. The nominee is clearly qualified and it's the naysayers who are filibustering the nominee because their "superstar" wasn't picked. BOO-HOO! O'Connor was a turn-coat regarding her record, but if it all looks good on paper, right?
We can do better than a 55-45 split once the RINOs are purged from the ranks and the DUmocrat sponsored voting fraud is eliminated. The has-been media will be more than willng to go to bat for any filibustering senators.
Where did you stand on Roberts when many on FR were griping about him too? What about any of your choices for a O'Connor replacement that is not currently on the bench?
It took 40 years for the conservatives to get here and it will take longer to undo the 60+ years worth of damage done to our country by LIEberalism.
Who, apparently, she calls her favorite Justice. Very telling. Burger was amiable but bland, not necessarily the brightest bulb on the Court, who despite personally believing in a strict interpretation of the Constitution was unable the move the Court in that direction and didn't even really try. History repeats?
I realize I keep hawking Alex Kozinski here, but it's instructive to compare him with Burger. Despite sitting on the Ninth Circuit, Kozinski isn't content to sit back and vote in the minority and sulk. Instead, he writes blistering dissents, full of the plainest of sense and logic. In one case, in fact, his dissent in a ruling that upheld a criminal conviction was so scathing and so straightforward, the government despite winning the appeal dropped the charges against the defendant. It's been called the Greatest Dissent. Now that's lawyering. That's the kind of man who can influence not only whatever Court he sits on, but public opinion as well. That's the kind of man we need on the Supreme Court. Not some amiable but bland nobody.
"Meekness" is not one of them.
They'd have to jettison Thomas, then.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.