Free Republic

just breaking!!!!!!!!

Senators disagreed yesterday over the Supreme Court prospects for Harriet Miers, with a key Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee saying the nominee would lose a confirmation vote, a prediction dismissed by two of the panel's Republicans, including its chairman. "If you held the vote today, she would not get a majority either in the Judiciary Committee or on the floor," said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat and one of the committee's most vocal liberals. Mr. Schumer noted that only a handful of Republican senators have endorsed the nominee. But Chairman Arlen Specter, Pennsylvania Republican, called such statements...

This is a long post, because it was composed on the long flight back from Italy where my wife and I spent a week of vacation. Much to my wife’s dismay, I have been thinking about (at length) and occasionally writing about (in brief bursts) the nomination of Harriet Miers. I am convinced that this is a huge moment not just for the president, Ms Miers and SCOTUS, but also for the GOP and consequently the country. If you believe, as I do, that the country’s safety cannot be attended to by Democratic presidents or majorities in the Congress –not...

Washington Prowler Rove, Miers Under Siege By The Prowler Published 10/24/2005 12:08:28 AM ROVE'S VISION MSNBC, Chris Matthews, and other MSM outlets have been having way too much fun at the expense of Karl Rove and others enmeshed in the mess brought on by the lies of former ambassador Joe Wilson. On Friday, Hardball featured a breathless report about the possible huge shakeups at the White House were Rove and others forced to step aside to clear their good names. But in reality, Rove and others have been looking for a major shakeup before much of what is spinning out...

Monday, October 24, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT President Bush has returned from a weekend in Camp David, where much of the discussion centered on the beleaguered nomination of Harriet Miers. While the president is determined to press forward, the prognosis he received was grim. Her visits with senators have gone poorly. Her written answers to questions from the Senate were sent back as if they were incomplete homework. The nominee herself has stumbled frequently in the tutorials in which government lawyers are grilling her in preparation for her Nov. 7 hearings.

As president of the State Bar of Texas, Harriet Miers wrote that "our legal community must reflect our population as a whole," and under her leadership the organization embraced racial and gender set-asides and set numerical targets to achieve that goal. The Supreme Court nominee's words and actions from the early 1990s, when she held key leadership positions as president-elect and president of the state bar, provide the first window into her personal views on affirmative action, an area in which the Supreme Court is closely divided and where Miers could tip the court's balance. Her tenure at the bar...

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, "the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause." But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution's guarantee of "equal protection of the laws" does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population. "That's a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal...

Operation Rescue renews its call for Miers’ withdrawalWashington, DC – The highly esteemed Judge Robert Bork weighed in yesterday on the controversial Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. Miers has been under scrutiny in the past week for having no paper trail or judicial experience.Former Federal Judge Robert Bork, whose nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in an historically contentious battle in 1987, described the choice of Miers as “a disaster on every level.”Bork, considered the perhaps finest intellectual mind in the legal community, joins a growing number of conservatives expressing concern over the Miers nomination and...

I have finally hit upon a misdeed by the Bush Administration so outrageous, so appalling, so egregious, I am calling for a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to investigate: Who told the President to nominate Harriet Miers? The commission should also be charged with getting an answer to this question: Who was his second choice? Things are so bad, the best option for Karl Rove now would be to get himself indicted. Then at least he'd have a colorable claim to having no involvement in the Miers nomination. This week's Miers update is: (1) Miers is a good bowler (New...

Bush shows himself to be indifferent, if not hostile, to conservative values. With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals. There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional...

Supreme Court: Withdraw Miers SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER EDITORIAL BOARD President Bush should withdraw the nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court. The reason is not her personal views on abortion, although her 1989 support of a proposed constitutional amendment to outlaw abortions except to save the life of the mother is troubling. The reason is not her religious faith. Many God-fearing jurists have graced the Supreme Court. It's not that she's a Bush crony, although a seat on the Supreme Court is something one should aspire to, not stumble into. It is not even the fact that she's never...

After the initial shock and awe over her nomination, the outcome of Harriet Miers's bid to join the Supreme Court now depends on how many Senate Republicans join conservative critics determined to bring her down. The White House had expected a small army of conservative groups to provide covering fire for nominees as they charged through the Senate. But many are now missing in action or outright hostile, because they doubt the nominee's legal and conservative credentials. The result is that Ms. Miers is now going it alone, making her testimony at next month's Judiciary Committee hearings even more important....

From the questionnaire she gave to the Senate and posted on NRO: "The role of the judiciary in our system of government is limited. While its role and its independence are essential to the proper functioning of our tripartite system of government, the courts cannot be the solution to society’s ills, and the independence of the courts provides no license for them to be free-wheeling. And, of course, parties should not be able to establish social policy through court action, having failed to persuade the legislative branch or the executive branch of the wisdom and correctness of their preferred course....

More controversy over Miers Specter, White House at odds on her position on privacy case Tuesday, October 18, 2005; WASHINGTON (CNN) -- As the White House renewed its attempts to rally backing for Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, her views -- or non-views -- on a key privacy case appeared to ignite more controversy. Miers spent much of Monday on Capitol Hill visiting with senators, among them Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter. After their meeting, Specter told reporters that Miers said she believed the 1965 case of Griswold v. Connecticut -- a landmark ruling establishing the right to privacy...

Harriet Miers’s confirmation hearings are about to begin, so we may be on the verge of learning something meaningful about the president’s choice to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court. Or maybe we won’t. We haven’t learned much since she was named, and one suspects there might not be all that much more out there. I don’t know enough about Ms. Miers even to guess at her qualifications for the job to which she has been appointed. I’ve heard good and bad things about her from those who’ve dealt with her, and I’ve read reams of opinion...

Senator finds his sitdown with Supreme Court nominee yields no insights and shows some weakness in law BY GLENN THRUSH AND TOM BRUNE WASHINGTON BUREAU October 18, 2005 WASHINGTON -- Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers emphatically denied she's on a secret mission to overturn Roe v. Wade, Sen. Charles Schumer said yesterday after meeting with her and complaining that their discussion left him questioning her constitutional knowledge. Despite her assurances, the encounter left Schumer noncommittal on Miers' candidacy. Schumer told a throng of reporters camped outside his Capitol Hill office that Miers either withheld her opinions -- or didn't have...

If you listen to what we conservatives were saying about John Roberts or Judge Pickering or any of the other judicial nominees who were being blocked by the Democrat filibusters - or other methods of killing a presidential nomination to the federal bench - the argument we were making was that the president won the election, and by virtue of that victory has the right to appoint judges of his own choosing. It was the conservative battle cry that the president’s nominees had the right to go through the process and be voted on by the full Senate. We jumped...

The White House, caught off guard by the intensity of the conservative backlash to Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, plans to try to refocus the debate over the next week onto her legal qualifications and away from issues such as her religion, senior presidential advisers said yesterday. Acknowledging that the campaign for Miers had slipped out of their control, the advisers said they will seek to validate her credentials for the high court through a series of media appearances, newspaper opinion pieces and letters of support from various people who have known the White House counsel during her previous career...

It's very interesting to go to RadioBlogger's july 2005 archives and read what Mr. Hewitt was saying about the SC back then. Here's a small sample. I'll put them all together, the perfect ingredients for a ** sandwich: Hugh Hewitt on why federal judicial experience and a track record do matter: You see, I've tried to explain to people about Judge Janice Rogers Brown, that she has not been a federal judge. And my concern over her and Priscilla Owen is, that federal judges just do different things than state judges. And I want to see a little bit from...

Did you ever have to tell a friend "That’s not funny. No, I mean it; that’s seriously not funny"? Then there’s that awkward moment when you’re both just sort of embarrassed? When it’s kind of painful to be friends, but you have to do something because you *are* friends. Now imagine your friend is the most powerful man in the world. Bush may have thought that the liberals who so much hate Alberto Gonzalez were the butt of his jokes when he purposely made coy suggestions that he would nominate Gonzalez to the Supreme Court. His problem is that serious...