Tony Snow and Thomas Sowell: A Little Rationality on Harriet Miers

I guess that's why we never got tax cuts. Or approval to invade Iraq.

Hmmm.. I think the Democrats were for invading Iraq before they were against Bush for doing it. Bush's problems didn't really start until after that. In fact, that's what most of the interrogation of Miers is going to revolve around.

You need to follow polls that aren't skewed towards Dems. Rasmussen has him near 50 percent - or just under the number of folks who re-elected him.

Wow! Almost 50%!! Let's throw a parade.
Those are alright numbers for a mediocre president, but pretty bad for a good one. So just what are you saying?

That is from media bias. And the funny thing about bias - if they are going to rip into you no matter what you do, why care what they are going to say? And despite all the lies and bias, Bush won anyway.

Yeah, and the media will take every opportunity they can to rip Bush, as you said. So why is he hand delivering the opportunity for them to rip him on all of their favorite tried and true themes at once?

The difference was Bush's base always remained behind him. Now he's lost at least half of them. If there is one thing people care about more than their lame duck president is the future of the Supreme Court. Bush only has 3 years left, but who he puts on the Court will have 30.

People were also behind Nixon until John Dean got on the stand. Dean was the White House Legal Counsel, by the way...

Wow! Almost 50%!! Let's throw a parade. Those are alright numbers for a mediocre president, but pretty bad for a good one.

Yeah, that's right. Reagan's numbers never dropped that low /sarcasm.

Yeah, and the media will take every opportunity they can to rip Bush, as you said. So why is he hand delivering the opportunity for them to rip him on all of their favorite tried and true themes at once?

Do you realize how absurd you are being here? Don't you think the media would rip into Bush even harder if he nominated someone you would like to see nominated? As would the Dems?

That is why your position here makes absolutely no sense whatsover.

.. or buy another one of their damn books..

Amen.

..she has completely gone over-the-top with these kind of comments..

Her behavior recently has made me wonder if she has not just been working the conservative side of the street because she saw a niche to be filled. And now that she is a Name, and wealthy, she can let go and be herself ... ?

Do you realize how absurd you are being here? Don't you think the media would rip into Bush even harder if he nominated someone you would like to see nominated? As would the Dems?

So Janice Rogers Brown was in the White House advising Bush on an "illegal war"?
Michael Luttig was shaping detainee policy when prisoners in Abu Ghraib were being abused?
Sam Alito was advising Karl Rove and Scooter Libby on what they could and couldn't say to reporters about Valerie Plame?
Priscilla Owen reviewed every document to come in or out of the Oval Office since January 2001?

Oh, wait. All of the above was Harriet Miers!

Bush took a situation where the debate would have been about the judicial philosophy of his nominee and chose instead to make it about himself and his administration's scandals.
This is why he is so vulnerable by nominating Miers of all people. A different nominee wouldn't have given the Democrats and the media a direct line of attack on the administration itself. Now everything Bush has done, every document he has seen in the past 5 years is fair game. Nothing is going to be off limits. It's going to be open season on the White House.

Hardly a week goes by that doesn't bring a decision from a federal court or the Supreme Court that causes paroxysms of wonder and disgust at what has been done by that court to the remaining shreds of our Constitutional Rights. The one thing that conservatives do agree on, however, is that the maiming and distortion of that wondrous document, the Constitution, is caused mainly by activist judges usurping the powers of not only the other two branches of government but of the Constitution itself. Too many of our "Living Document" decisions result in what I can only think of as the excreta from such an organism, and that applies to the convenient finding of "privacy," to uphold an otherwise untenable position as well as it does the taking of private property for the use of another private entity. Decisions such as these can only be arrived at by highly trained and expert individuals who will seriously entertain the argument of, "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is."

The fact that these decisions emanate from top graduates of ivy league colleges and universities fails to allay my misgivings, nor am I soothed by the fact that before being seated on the Supreme Court they had impeccable credentials, paper trails and other indicia of a conservative bent. Nominees from Warren to Souter, appointed because of their impressive conservative credentials have, about half the time, proved to be something else entirely once seated. We could do as well flipping a coin. That being so, I'm surprised by the caterwauling of protest from the conservative side that Miers doesn't have the same attributes and credentials which, in the past, have demonstrated such spectacular unreliability.

That said, I must admit that when President Bush was given a chance for a second nomination, I was pulling for Janice Brown. I basked in the thought of the committee attack dogs unleashing their vitriol on the accomplished daughter of a poor, black sharecropper. I looked forward, with eager anticipation, to the nuking of the filibuster of judicial nominations (another product of that Living Document). I could see, taste and feel the final humiliation of a democratic party which seems to have abanoned every American principle for the acquisition of power. It didn't happen.

What happened is that the President talked privately with 80 Senators and most likely was left with the hard fact that he had neither the 60 votes to overcome a filibuster nor the votes to invoke the nuclear option. Quite a quandry to someone who had promised to nominate strict constructionists to the courts, but that was the hand he was dealt and he chose to play it the best way he could to fulfill his promise. Notice, his promise was to nominate to the courts people who would not legislate from the bench and would be strict constructionists; he didn't promise to nominate anyone from a select list of schools nor anyone whose other credentials would be impressive. His promise was no more complex than the provisions of the Constitution he seeks to protect; and, as far as I can tell, he's attempting to make good that promise in spite of a spineless Senate, which has robbed him of a theoretical majority; democrats shrieking accusations of cronyism; and even members of his own base who, with varying degrees of rabidity. have received his solution with Rottweiler-like suspicion and distrust.

Restricting myself to only those things the President has actually done, I see no reason to reject this nominee. His other judicial appointments have, in my opinion, been excellent; and this is with the knowledge that there are no guarantees going in. No one can guarantee that Roberts is going to be a conservative, strict constructionist Chief Justice, nor can they guarantee that Miers or any replacement forced upon us would be. Such things, as Rummy says, are "unknowable." However, from the things I've seen President do, I believe he's true to his word and that he will act for the benefit of the country, and that if he promised to deliver a strict constructionist then, yes, I'll accept his opinion of someone he's known more than 10 years over the opinion of the most learned pundits clamoring for a clear record and a paper trail. I can see no reason to believe that, after all this time of telling us what he wants and using Miers to find and vet people who would fill the bill, he would suddenly do a left turn and push on us, for any reason, someone he didn't feel was the best he could provide given the circumstances. Yes, I will trust him that far because he's demonstrated he deserves it.

Do I wish he'd do more now to protect our borders? Yes. Do I wish he'd vetoed a few bills? Yes. But, as I said before, I'm resticting this to things he HAS done, and these gripes, complaints, or sore points aren't immediately applicable to the problem at hand. We don't have a perfect President and we never will, but I can compare him favorably with any (yes, any) great President of the past - including Reagan.

What does disappoint me is the number of people whom I've learned to respect now say that "They're outta here!" Meaning, I suppose, that they can no longer vote for the GOP, since the President's not running for anything. Unless that is an overstatement of disappointment that their particular favorites wasn't picked for the slot or the battle which they'd prepared for wasn't joined, then I beg to rethink the situation. The battle isn't between Republican and Democrat; it's betwen Conservative and liberal, or Good and Evil if you wish. Is that a fight you really want to abandon? If you don't like the GOP the way it is, I assure you, it's far easier to change it than to replace it. The ranks swelling any or all of the high-sounding third parties don't even elevate them to double digits. On the other hand, the Libertarian or Constitutionalist wings of the Republican party could very well be instrumental in making the GOP the conservative enclave we seek.

I do not have the faith in Bush that you do. I do not believe he is always true to his word. Not at all. But I do think Miers should be confirmed. If Republicans could confirm the awful judges Clinton put forth then they can confirm Miers. She's not entirely unqualified, though she is a weak and unknown choice.

I understand. Faith, as always, is a personal and private matter, and although I'd like to rely on faith as little as possible in politics, such may be impossible. If nothing else, I've seen many upon whom I wouldn't bestow my trust.

"Well-known Constitutional expert Kennedy doesn't seem to have turned out the way his resume and record indicated."

Kennedy also did not have a strict constructionist or originalist record, as a Luttig does. Reagan was warned against O'Connor as she had no such track record either. It's not just that you pick someone exceedingly bright for the highest court or with a good resume. You pick someone who is exceedingly bright WITH a strict constructionist or originalist track record. Neither Kennedy nor O'Connor fit that bill. Luttig does. Priscilla Owens or Janice Rogers Brown do. Miers doesn't. Not at all. In fact barely a record at all. So then it once again comes down to trusting Bush's "gut" instinct. Hope it's better than Bush Sr's was, or Reagan w/O'Connor, etc. Which do you think is preferable, a known track record of strict interpretation of the constitution based on our forefathers' thinking, or an unknown one picked on "instinct"? I'll go for the known thank you. Hopefully we will luck out here, but I sure would have preferred the more known over the unknown. Nothing in life is cast in concrete; however, if a person has a reasonably long history of faithfully interpreting the letter of the constitution and expressing this over and over as their judicial philosophy, that's a pretty good clue. With Harriet Miers we are clueless.

Of course I would prefer a known quantity. The problem is, that the GOP RINO's do NOT want a known quantity. They are afraid of their constituents (Snowe, Chaffee, Colllins) or they are afraid of the press (Voinovich, DeWine) or they are afraid of the democrats (Specter, Warner) or they belong to the "I am not president because you are so I will stick it to you" gang (McCain, Lugar, Hagel).

That's 10 votes that the President can't count on, and are probably no votes.

Now, Harriet Miers isn't a constitutional scholar. She has worked in corporate and business law, which is pretty complicated. She has done so successfully.

She is also humble enough to know she isn't a scholar like Scalia or Roberts. My guess is that she would follow their lead while learning as much as she can as quickly as possible.

She also, by virtue of not having a paper trail, can get confirmed with the votes of the RINO's. (Let me remind you that we need their votes for confirmation, because on this vote the democrats will be in lock-step.)

This was Bush's dilemma: to get someone he is sure is an originalist who will not legislate from the bench, even though her credentials are slim, or nominate a paper trail conservative who would lose because of RINO defection.

I am willing to take Miers. If she proves to be incompetent or shows liberal tendencies in her testimony, I will withdraw my support.

This nomination cannot be judged unless the political situation in the Senate is taken into account. I am not merely speculating. Susan Collins wrote the President and asked that he not nominate a "controversial nominee" and was joined in that letter by several senators. Specter told Bush not to "blow up the Senate" and said he would oppose any nominee that had been confirmed by the compromise of the Gang of 14 (Owens, Brown, etc.). Warner was concerned about destroying the comity of the Senate.

So, what would you do? The President isn't going to send a nominee to go through that meat-grinder of the hearings if he knows that the nominee is DOA; an attractive characteristic of the President is that he doesn't treat people like cannon fodder.

Again, what would you do? I think he is threading the needle and doing the best he can to honor his promise.