I have no respect for any Democratic senator who finds Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court acceptable, such as Charles Schumer, Harry Reid and others. I understand why most Republican senators would support her – despite her utter lack of qualifications, she passes their religion/abortion tests. But how can a Democratic senator support her when she lacks any evidence of the intellectual firepower necessary to sit on the Court, and probably doesn’t agree with them on substantive issues to boot? I’m flummoxed, unless they’re pretending to like her in order not to give Republicans more reasons to support her.
I loathe this nominee. It’s odd that I find myself agreeing with people like George Will and Charles Krauthammer (BTW, doesn’t he totally look like Mandy Patinkin?), but I do.
Of course, I feel some schadenfreude watching many conservatives get as angry about this nomination as I am. But that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with them, even if my reasons are slightly different than theirs:
For more than two decades, conservatives have been developing a team of potential justices for the high court in preparation for a moment such as this. They point to jurists such as Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Judge Michael W. McConnell of the 10th Circuit and Judge Priscilla R. Owen, newly sworn in on the 5th Circuit, as examples of people who have not just paid their dues but also weathered intellectual battles in preparation for reshaping the Supreme Court….
“The feeling was after John Roberts that surely the president was going to have to go to the bench where there were all these very excellent people who are serving on the circuit court or scholars who have been grooming for this possibility for years and years,” said Paul M. Weyrich, a leading voice in the conservative movement and one who has been openly skeptical of Miers.
Luttig and McConnell are highly qualified for the Court and I could respect them. But Owen? She might be intellectually qualified (is she? I don’t know), but she’s a major radical and I find her decisions odious. It’s Miers’s lack of intellectual qualifications and experience that concern me more than her purported judicial “philosophy” (if she even has one). Although that does bother me, too.
That said, she could pull a John Kerry during her confirmation hearings. Many people were surprised by John Kerry’s first presidential debate performance because they had built up all these preconceived notions about him in a portrait painted by the Republicans. It’s possible that Miers is a lot smarter than I’m giving her credit for.
But there’s no reason to believe that’s true unless there’s any evidence for it.
Harriet Miers was an awful, awful choice for a nomination. She’s completely unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court and her name should be withdrawn.
Props for the use of “odious.” I concur.
I’m still waiting for the press to provide us with some idea of her legal career. I’ve heard that she was a trial lawyer- what trials? What cases?
The obnoxious view that we should support her because she is a conservative Christian is particularly alarming. Jerry Falwell is a conservative Christian too, does that therefore make him qualified for the Supreme Court.
Harriet Miers was Bush’s “it’s good to be king” pick. He cannot run for election again, he manipulated the right yet again to earn his “re-election” and it worked. Now, for the first time, the neo-cons and the religious right are leaning what the rest of this country learned a long time ago: Bush lies. Simple as that.
And as for Harry Reid’s support of Meirs, I am not so sure that it is as bad as you might think. Let’s consider for a second this: with this nomination, Bush has split his base and the Meirs pick is threatening the very glue that held the Republican Party together. There is now an internal civil war within the party! Rove and Libby are on the chopping block, Delay and Frist are under investigation too…by “doffing the cap” at Miers, the democrats are putting a squeeze on the Republicans in the Sentate. Cloth coat republicans don’t want to see her confirmed any more as the Democrats do. However, she was on a list of nominees submitted by the Democrats and Bush was arrogant enough to take the bait. Now the Democrats just have to sit back, grab some popcorn and watch the Republicans bat themselves over the head.
A kind word for Meirs is not necessarily support and support is not necessarily a yea vote. It’s a game, and I think that the Democrats are taking the right path: stay out of the public limelight and watch how this thing plays out — at the same time, putting a little pressure on the Right to make them panic, thus causing even more chaos. Beautiful.