“The whole strategy here is the so-called stealth strategy: picking candidates for the Supreme Court who have no judicial record on things that really matter.”
The approach has been tried before, he said, and “the only ones who get fooled by it are conservatives.”
I am still not sure exactly what constitutes a moderate, but Joe at
The Moderate Voice has some interesting things to say about the Miers nomination and conservatives. Nice last sentence, Joe. Heh.
To many proud conservatives, the Miers selection was the equivalent of shoving conservatism into the political closet. Don’t ask don’t tell if she’s for overturning Roe Versus Wade. But Bush’s spurned conservative political lovers are not holding their feelings back. CNN has this:
Gary Bauer, director of the American Values Coalition, took issue with comments made by Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, who said last week that critics of the nomination should “shut up for a few minutes” and give people a chance to learn more about Miers.
“We’re not going to find out anything more,” Bauer told “Fox News Sunday.” “The whole strategy here is the so-called stealth strategy: picking candidates for the Supreme Court who have no judicial record on things that really matter.”
The approach has been tried before, he said, and “the only ones who get fooled by it are conservatives.”
Bush seemingly winks at Democrats and suggests she’s a conservative they can live with.
Bush seemingly winks at conservatives and suggests she’s one of them.
There’s so much winking going on, you’d swear it was the Clinton White House….
The Colossus thinks that supporting the president in this time of war trunps any issues that Miers nomination raises. I’m not sure how well I can live with Miers being a bad judge though.
I neither have unshakable faith in Bush, nor do I put loyalty to the Republican party above everything else.
I just don’t see how it benefits me to bloody the President in time of war.
To me, the war trumps all else. You can either support the Republicans (fight on at all cost) or the Democrats (retreat as soon as politically expedient). In other words, one party wants to win. The other party is perfectly willing to accept defeat.
I’m not going to be kicking Bush in the head with a steel-toed boot, as so many conservatives seem to want to do, over a judicial nomination. I may make the occasional joke about it, but let my position be clear — I’m not going to attack him over this.
Miers might be a terrible judge. You know what? I can live with that.
John Fund at The Wall Street Journal says that conservatives are right to be skeptical and points out the bad track record that Republican presidents have on appointing Supreme Court justices:
Gerald Ford personally told members of his staff that John Paul Stevens was “a good Republican, and would vote like one.” Justice Stevens has since become the leader of the court’s liberal wing.
After leaving office, Dwight Eisenhower was asked by a reporter if he had made any mistakes as president. “Two,” Ike replied. “They are both on the Supreme Court.” He referred to Earl Warren and William Brennan, both of whom became liberal icons.
Richard Nixon personally assured conservatives that Harry Blackmun would vote the same way as his childhood friend, Warren Burger. Within four years, Justice Blackmun had spun Roe v. Wade out of whole constitutional cloth. Chief Justice Burger concurred in Roe, and made clear he didn’t even understand what the court was deciding: “Plainly,” he wrote, “the Court today rejects any claim that the Constitution requires abortions on demand.”
Gerald Ford personally told members of his staff that John Paul Stevens was “a good Republican, and would vote like one.” Justice Stevens has since become the leader of the court’s liberal wing.
An upcoming biography of Sandra Day O’Connor by Supreme Court reporter Joan Biskupic includes correspondence from Ronald Reagan to conservative senators concerned about her scant paper trail. The message was, in effect: Trust me. She’s a traditional conservative. From Roe v. Wade to racial preferences, she has proved not to be. Similarly, Paul Weyrich of the Free Congress Foundation recalls the hard sell the Reagan White House made on behalf of Anthony Kennedy in 1987, after the Senate rejected Robert Bork. “They even put his priest on the phone with us to assure us he was solid on everything,” Mr. Weyrich recalls. From term limits to abortion to the juvenile death penalty to the overturning of a state referendum on gay rights, Justice Kennedy has often disappointed conservatives.
Most famously, White House chief of staff John Sununu told Pat McGuigan, an aide to Mr. Weyrich, that the appointment of David Souter in 1990 would please conservatives. “This is a home run, and the ball is still ascending. In fact, it’s just about to leave earth orbit,” he told Mr. McGuigan. At the press conference announcing the appointment, the elder President Bush asserted five times that Justice Souter was “committed to interpreting, not making the law.” The rest is history.
Right Wing News e-mailed more than 200 right-of-center bloggers (he somehow missed me) and asked 4 questions about the Miers nomination. 79 blogs reponded. 49% said that nominating Miers was a “bad or terrible decision” and 53% says that it made them think less favorably of Bush. It’s not a scientific poll, but I think we can conclude that all is not well in BloggerLand with regards to Harriet Miers.
Glenn Reynolds at InstaPundit says that “her nomination looks like a major political blunder for the Administration, which has yet to provide any very convincing reasons why she belongs on the court more than any of several thousand other lawyers with similar credentials.” Strictly speaking, Glenn is correct, but the main reason Miers was nominated — and it’s by no means a had reason — is that she has served President Bush well for over 10 years and he has faith in her. That’s what it all boils down to.
Skymusings says that Miers has done an excellent job of vetting judges for Bush and that counts for something. I have to say that I agree.
The President has demonstrated an ability and willingness to nominate solid conservative judges over the course of his time in office. Ms. Miers has been a major part of this, from assisting in the process of selection to vetting and finally to preparing nominees for confirmation, including Justice Roberts. They have a close personal and professional friendship that dates back to the Reagan years. It is safe to say that he truly believes and trusts that she will embody the principles he seeks to invest in that seat.
Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online has some troubling words:
The most telling thing about Miers is that she sees membership in the Federalist Society as excessively “political,” yet doesn’t think twice about associating herself with a lecture series that invites the likes of Gloria Steinem, Pat Schroeder, and Susan Faludi.
The most telling thing about Miers is that she sees membership in the Federalist Society as excessively “political,” yet doesn’t think twice about associating herself with a lecture series that invites the likes of Gloria Steinem, Pat Schroeder, and Susan Faludi. That’s because Miers’ political career is based on being the one member of the conservative Texas establishment that liberal feminists can best work with. Miers has spent a lifetime being the sort of conservative who tries to swim within the “mainstream.” Miers would rather make a partnership with the far left, than risk being called an outsider on the right. Her almost obsessive silence about her political views probably derives in part from the fact that her own support base comprehends everyone from pro-life evangelical conservatives to Susan Faludi-like feminists.
Even when Miers went out of her way to make a conservative point–as in the drive for ABA neutrality on abortion–her underlying purpose was to keep her Texas group connected to the national center of “mainstream” liberalism (and her formal position was mere neutrality). And even if Miers’ advice to the White House to go slow on affirmative action and stem cells was based on a political calculation, it was a calculation that fit very comfortably with Miers’ long-term intellectual-political orientation. Whatever her personal views, Miers doesn’t feel comfortable openly positioning herself to the right of what liberals call the “mainstream” on social issues. My sense is that this makes Miers into something of a Sandra Day O’Connor figure–someone who could go either way on the big social issues. On the one hand, Miers’s personal instincts are conservative. On the other hand, she is used to working in coalition with, making concessions to, and often sympathizing with, feminist liberals. (David Frum’s excerpts from Miers’s writings broadly support this point.)
I read Molly Ivins so that you don’t have to. Her latest piece is entitled Miers is a Texas Fundamentalist Christian, which evidently is a more serious crime than being Saddam Hussein in Molly-Land. The never-witty Miss Ivins sez:
[W]e are now beset by people who insist on dragging religion into governance - and who themselves believe they are beset by people determined to “drive God from the public square.”
This division has been in part created by and certainly aggravated by those seeking political advantage. It is a recipe for an incredibly damaging and serious split in this country, and I believe we all need to think long and carefully before doing anything to make it worse.
As an 1803 quote attributed to James Madison goes: “The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe with blood for centuries.”
Good golly, will someone please tell Miss Molly that the bloodiest tyrants in the history of the world were all atheists: Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, and Mao Zhe Dong.
Beldar points out the relevance of Harriet Miers’ managerial skills:
Being chosen as a large law firm’s managing partner, and being successful in that role once chosen, reflects certain useful management skills, as the title implies. More specifically, running a law firm is a lot like herding cats. And not housecats, but lions — a “pride” of lions, I believe they call it. Hungry, dangerous, big cats with bigger egos and sharp claws and teeth, plus the ability, and the incentive when they perceive themselves slighted, to drag off into another part of the jungle their own recent kills along with their protegés and subordinates. Dealing with partner-level lawyers requires tact, creativity, flexibility, judgment, listening and communication skills, the learned or intuitive ability to broker compromises, and finally (but not least importantly) a backbone of steel and the ability to display and occasionally use one’s own teeth and claws. The “people skills” expected of a managing partner, while perhaps particularly important for a Chief Justice in the context of the Supreme Court, are not unimportant for other Justices. The Chief Justice, simply put, has but one vote, and he is not always himself in the majority.
Beyond “people skills,” though, having managed a large law firm vouchsafes that someone has the important perspectives and experiences that come from running a business. Being chosen by one’s partners for this role reflects in part their judgment as to one’s business acumen and common sense, independent from one’s expertise as a legal scholar-practitioner. In many ways, running a large institutional law firm, with offices in several cities and a large nonlawyer support staff, can be like running a medium-sized business corporation. It’s not General Electric, but neither is it a mom-and-pop drugstore. It takes people skills to split the pie among partners; but it takes business skills to ensure that there’s a pie to split, and to grow and expand it. That Ms. Miers may bring to the Court the instincts and perspectives from “middle America” and from the world of commerce generally is, I think, a very encouraging thing.
Ron Elving at NPR (yes, that %^*(@*$& taxpayer-funded NPR that nobody listens to) wonders whether Miers could be her own self on the court or an extension of the White House into the Judicial Branch. He thinks that conservatives ought to be basically happy with Miers:
At some point in the hearings process, this objection to Miers should ascend to a higher priority than it has been given to date. But so far at least it has been hard to compete with the roar of disapproval coming from those movement conservatives disappointed in the Myers pick. They had thought that O’Connor’s retirement would ring in a new era on the Court, one in which arch-conservative Antonin Scalia would be joined by another like-minded powerhouse who would help him tip the balance of legal reasoning on the Court. Instead, President Bush is asking them to be satisfied with a lower profile justice who will probably at least vote with Scalia most of the time.
For some conservatives, that additional vote is enough. It could be a fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and get the court back on the side of traditional marriage and religion in the public sphere.
