Posted on 10/08/2005 3:00:04 PM PDT by AntiGuv
IT should have been the crowning moment of his administration, the opportunity to exercise one of his most important privileges as President by picking two new judges to serve on the Supreme Court, thereby stamping his mark on American society for the next few decades, as only a few presidents have done before him. Instead, President Bush’s astonishingly short-sighted decision last week to nominate a close colleague with no judicial track record for the Supreme Court, following an earlier uninspired choice, risks condemning his administration to being remembered as the most debilitating since the sorry rule of Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s. There is no pleasure in recording this. This newspaper is second to none in its pro-American sentiments; in the early Bush years it devoted much ink to defending the President against the often malevolent and ignorant attacks of a congenitally anti-American European media. But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamed of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed into the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.
The importance of senior judicial nominations cannot be understated in American politics. There are only nine justices on the Supreme Court and they serve for life. Last month’s death from thyroid cancer of Chief Justice William Rehnquist and the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor was a unique opportunity for Mr Bush to tilt the Supreme Court to the right, completing the reversal of the liberal dominance instituted under President Roosevelt seven decades ago. There is not much in Mr Bush’s conservative social agenda that we admire but the two vacancies were an opportunity finally to bring down the curtain on the unconstitutional judicial activism which has dominated the Court since the Roosevelt years. Sadly but characteristically, Mr Bush has blown it: instead of the conservative intellectual jurists that his supporters had the right to expect, Mr Bush has made the mediocre John Roberts, a moderate conservative with an undistinguished legal track record, the new Chief Justice and nominated Harriet Miers for the O’Connor vacancy. The Roberts appointment is not a disaster, though it shows a poverty of imagination. But the Miers nomination is pure cronyism. There are supposedly 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States, the most judicially-obsessed country on earth (no doubt there are already even more since that last count); out of this 1m-strong universe, Ms Miers would not make the shortlist of even the top 5,000. She has been nominated because she is a close confidante of the President, a former staff secretary, personal lawyer and currently White House counsel.
This is a missed opportunity of historic proportions. The modern Supreme Court has set the standard for America’s lesser courts to use the judicial system as a mechanism for social change, for which Americans did not necessarily vote, in areas ranging from school bussing and prayer to the death penalty and abortion (and most recently the powers of the President versus those of Congress in times of war). An extraordinary decision by the Supreme Court in June illustrates its power and the controversial nature of its decisions: it ruled five to four that local governments could force property owners to sell their homes to private developers whenever officials decide it would “benefit the public”, even if the property is not blighted and the new project’s success is not guaranteed. So, a new supermarket that wants to bulldoze local homes to expand its car park can now do so if it can convince local politicians (whose campaigns it might have bankrolled) to claim that this is somehow in the public interest, thus ensuring that homeowners are summarily kicked out; even the French would not give the state this amount of power.
It is this kind of controversial activism that conservatives, both radical and moderate, were hoping Mr Bush would put an end to through his judicial appointments. The liberal-left in the Senate, which can block Supreme Court nominations, was gearing up for a last-ditch battle to stop the President packing the court with right-wingers; the American Right, which has spent the past three decades waiting for this moment, was ready to seize the moment. For both sides these appointments were to be the mother of all battles in America’s Kulturkampf war, the final and most important showdown for the heart and soul of America, making last year’s bitter Bush-Kerry election look like a sideshow. So, when it became apparent that the President had ducked a fight, not once but twice, by appointing relative unknowns to the bench, with no real guarantee of any ideological commitment, an uncontrolled rage overcame the US conservative movement last week.
They were already furious at the President’s incompetent selling of his social security reforms; they were equally angry at the collapse of his plans for major tax reforms through White House neglect; they have watched in despair as the President’s upbeat rhetoric in Iraq was confounded regularly by tragic events, including an appalling American death toll and a neo-con mission clearly adrift; those who fought the good fight to restrain government in the Reagan years stood by in disgust as Mr Bush increased domestic spending faster than at any time since President Johnson’s Great Society; and the nativist right is increasingly and dangerously surly at what it views as the President’s failure to tackle illegal immigration and secure the country’s borders. This litany of failure, in the eyes of the president’s natural constituencies, was bad enough. Then came Hurricane Katrina, which crystallised what even conservative Americans had been thinking about their president and opened the flood gates, not just in New Orleans but on the President himself.
His presidency is unlikely to recover, as The Business pointed out at the time. Of course, Mr Bush is not the only one to blame for the country’s inadequate reaction to Katrina; but given the scale of the natural disaster, the buck was always going to stop with him. As far as most Americans were concerned, it did: suddenly they saw the same incompetence of a commander-in-chief who had created a deadly quagmire in Iraq played out in the streets of one of their own cities. A president who, whatever his other shortcomings, had claimed leadership skills and competent administration was stripped bare. It was not a pretty sight and the response to his political plight was typically Bush: he announced his intention to throw a massive $200bn into reconstructing New Orleans. This merely completed Mr Bush’s demise among America’s wisest conservatives, who have always regarded his big-government conservatism as the greatest betrayal of all. Nor is it just the White House that is contaminated by it: when senior Republican leaders in Congress, who have presided over an orgy of public spending and pork-barrel, claimed that there was no fat left to cut in federal spending and that “after 11 years of Republican majority we’ve pared it down pretty good”, it was clear that the inmates had indeed taken over the asylum.
The American Right is still in the ascendant but is now faction-ridden, disillusioned and keener to take chunks out of itself than the opposition – much like the old left. Fashionable commentators on both sides of the Atlantic have started gleefully to predict its demise. But even Mr Bush’s cackhanded incompetence might not manage that. Powerful forces continue to nudge America to the right, whatever the inadequacies of the current Republican leadership. The GOP is extending its advantage with evangelical Protestants to Catholics and gradually loosening the Democrats’ stranglehold over Hispanics and Asian-Americans, the country’s fastest-growing minorities. Conservative sentiment is strongest in those parts of America where the population is growing fastest – especially the vast suburbs and “exburbs” of the South and West – while areas where the Democrats are strongest are losing people and influence. Far more Americans now describe themselves as conservatives than liberals; the Democrats now need to grab 60% of moderates if they want to win Congress or the White House, a pretty high hurdle, especially given the unimpressive state of the Democrat Party, which is increasingly in the grip of its left-wing activists and devoid of fresh or stimulating ideas.
The rise of a popular and populist right-wing politics in America over the past 35 years is one of the most extraordinary events in modern Western politics; it is unique to the United States, helping to explain the country’s exceptionalism and its growing cultural divergence with Europe. The damning charge against Mr Bush is that, instead of using the continued dominance of the right to finish the large amounts of uncompleted business from the Reagan revolution – sorting out the social security system, simplifying the tax code, tackling America’s abysmal primary and secondary schools, reforming corporate welfare with the same gusto as welfare for the poor was reformed, forging a new consensus to wage the war or terror – Mr Bush has failed in all these areas, and in some has taken America backwards.
There is now a distinctive fin de regime stink about Republican Washington. Karl Rove, the President’s eminence grise, has been called to testify before a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA officer’s name. The cronyism of Ms Miers’ nomination to the Supreme Court is now the rule in DC, not the exception: for example, Julie Myers, another inexperienced Bush lawyer, has been nominated to run the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. She has no convincing qualifications for this post, a vital one in an age of terror; but she is the niece of retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers and the wife of the Department of Homeland Security secretary’s chief of staff. This is worrying: the inadequate response to Katrina was not because of supposed federal budget cuts – an absurd criticism given how spending has ballooned during the Bush years – but more because the Federal Emergency Management Agency was crammed with incompetent cronies.
Then there is the case of Tom DeLay. The Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives since 2002 has been indicted with “conspiracy in a campaign finance scheme” and charges of conspiring to launder money. He has been forced to step down from his job as majority leader until the matter is resolved. Republicans claim the charges are politically-motivated and should be thrown out – Ronnie Earle, the Travis County District Attorney who has brought the indictments, is a Democrat – but even if Mr DeLay is cleared, the once fresh-faced Republicans who were ushered in on the tail coats of Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America in 1994 now look tired and complacent.
President Bush and his entourage are cultural conservatives, rather than radicals in the mould of Reagan, who was driven by his belief that freeing individuals and liberating the economy would produce a new and better society. The attitudes of Team Bush are driven more by upbringing, emotion and simple religious faith rather than an intellectual belief in the superiority of private action and the market economy. Instead of completing the Reagan revolution, which should have been Mr Bush’s historic mission, he is dangerously close to wrecking it. If the Republicans go down to defeat in the mid-term elections of 2006 and the presidential election of 2008, they will have only themselves to blame. But it is ordinary Americans who will pay the price for Mr Bush’s numerous follies.
Sorry, but John Roberts was a BRILLIANT choice!!
Oh, and Bush pushed Congress to pass the largest socialistic expansion of government since LBJ, Medicare Prescription Drugs, a bill that Congress was resistant to passing until Bush pushed for it. As much as it pains to me to say it, the growth of government under Clinton was less than it has been under Bush. And if Clinton had passed the Patriot Act and Homeland Security without doing anything to control our borders, this website would be up in arms. The Bushbots here have earned the name.
"The Roberts appointment is not a disaster, though it shows a poverty of imagination."
ROFLMAO... Bush only picked the most qualified person out there... how "unimaginative" to not pick an ACLU lawyer like Clinton did.
Does that apply all the pro-Meiers freepers who call anyone opposed to Meiers elitest, sexist, and trolls from DU?
Maybe my history is little rusty. My recollection is that during his second term Ronald Reagan laid the groundwork that ended the Cold War and brought down the Soviet Union, potentially avoiding a nuclear armageddon.
Nobody can predict the future, but if the real estate and stock markets roll over and fall, this thread may be debating the high point of Bush's second term.
Reagan laid the ground work in his first term. In his second, he was dogged by Iran Contra, and showed the first signs of mental aging. The evil empire collaped on Bush 1's watch.
where's the BARF alert?
Stick a fork in it. It's done.
That's my opinion. We have Freepers and others going balistic because they don't know Miers just like they didn't know Souter. The difference is that Bush41 didn't know Souter, either - and Bush43 is, to no small degree, about not making mistakes he knows his dad made.Bush43 is gonna retire to Texas in three short years - and he knows he'll be hearing about how his SCOTUS nominees turned out for the rest of his life.
The "two more" is exactly what I think GW was playing for. He knows Meiers is a solid choice, but can't be shown to be hard right because she has no track record. He is trying to entice another Supreme into retirement, by demonstrating his care for the country and doing what is "right" over doing what is "Right"(wing).
He'd better be careful though - that crony label is starting to get sticky. Also - there are quite a few uncomfortable points in this letter - immigration, runaway budget, lack of SS reform - I trust GW, but I hope he knows what he is doing.
So you will preemptively condemn anyone who disagrees with the you as "bushbots." That makes you superior how?
Julie Myers, another inexperienced Bush lawyer, has been nominated to run the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
That nomination is still making me scratch my head. I want to trust Bush, I really do, but there are these nagging doubts...
So far, his Judgement has been OK.
I THINK we should give him the "Benefit of the Doubt" & see how his Choices "Work Out!!"
We Hired the guy to be our "CEO;" SO FAR, he's Done OK!!
Doc
Ah, yes. Ronald Reagan, who knew nothing about Sandra Day O'Connor or Anthony Kennedy, and nominated them both.
Ronald Reagan, who cut and ran after 267 Marines were killed in Lebanon.
Ronald Reagan, who signed ZERO anti-abortion bills.
Ronald Reagan, who cut taxes, then raised them again, two years later.
I loved Ronald Reagan, who restored hope to this country after Jimmy Carter's malaise. But he had three SC picks, and he struck out on two of them.
This bloodletting amongst us folks is not a bad thing. Some things are worth fighting over and the role of the courts is one of them. If we lose the Senate in '06 what have we lost? It hasn't really benefited us very much. If you win elections you are expected to lead.
We have won elections and we have not led. We have been timid and spineless in the Senate. We are retreating from our past boldness in the House. We appear to be aimless in the WH. Given our overall failure to lead the country, the people of this country would be well within their rights to kick us out of the capitol and the WH.
A certain faction preemptively trashes anyone who dares to disagree with Bush on this nomination. Does that make them superior?
I expect Harriet to get on the court and then proceed to kick the crap out of liberal elitists. She and Roberts will refuse to create special rights to gay marraige and abortion at any time for any female at any age. These special rights do not exist in our constitution and these two will refuse to amend our contstitution by judical decree.Within one year --- two at the most --- there will be ample evidence that Roberts and Miers were the right picks at the right time. I wonder how many of the people here who are screaming that Bush betrayed them will return to this forum and honestly admit they were wrong.
The bet is whether Roberts/Miers will be in full agreement with either Thomas or Scalia in 90% of rulings this next year. I say no.
For Miers, we'd need to go with the 06-07 session.
We do well not to evaluate the propriety of a decision by simply anticipating or projecting that one day in the future all will be well. Our role as citizens of the republic is to evaluate the propriety of any decision based on the evidence we have at hand and experience. Anything else is an implicit faith in men. No one should be expected to engage in that.
Nope. I think they are cut from the same cloth. Meaningless name-calling is the same no matter who does it.
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