David Frum nicely sums up my concerns about Justice-designate Miers. I encourage you to read the whole thing, I'll just excerpt a bit:
So the question must be asked, as Admiral Rickover once demanded of Jimmy Carter: Why not the best?
I worked with Harriet Miers. She's a lovely person: intelligent, honest, capable, loyal, discreet, dedicated ... I could pile on the praise all morning. But there is no reason at all to believe either that she is a legal conservative or - and more importantly - that she has the spine and steel necessary to resist the pressures that constantly bend the American legal system toward the left.
I am not saying that she is not a legal conservative. I am not saying that she is not steely. I am saying only that there is no good reason to believe either of these things. Not even her closest associates on the job have no good reason to believe either of these things. In other words, we are being asked by this president to take this appointment purely on trust, without any independent reason to support it. And that is not a request conservatives can safely grant.
There have just been too many instances of seeming conservatives being sent to the high court, only to succumb to the prevailing vapors up there: O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter. Given that record, it is simply reckless for any conservative president, especially one backed by a 55-seat Senate majority, to take a hazard on anything other than a known quantity.
But here is what we do know: the pressures on a Supreme Court justice to shift leftward are intense. There is the negative pressure of the vicious, hostile press that legal conservatives must endure. And there are the sweet little inducements - the flattery, the invitations to conferences in Austria and Italy, the lectureships at Yale and Harvard - that come to judges who soften and crumble. Harriet Miers is a taut, nervous, anxious personality. It is impossible to me to imagine that she can endure the anger and abuse - or resist the blandishments - that transformed, say, Anthony Kennedy into the judge he is today.
Now, however, I take it my 'David Souter with balls' comment was more accurate than I at first realized. She's a lesbian, apparently. Why is Bush nominating a lesbian to SCOTUS? Doesn't that conflict with his whole Federal Marriage Amendment crusade? And won't that offend the base? To continue on that point, why is Jay Sekulow supporting a lesbian for SCOTUS? Did I miss something here?
Where's your evidence that she's a homosexual? Or is it just ok to accuse all people who are single and 60 of being homosexuals?
you may want to consider that conservatives "soften" on the supreme court bench because they are smart and are being presented the best arguments from the "other side". There is hope, or danger, depending on your vantage point, that Miers will undergo a similar transformation once she is removed from her political and social environment in which she is certainly less likely to encounter well-argued "liberal" viewpoints than she will be on the bench.
Then we agree!
No one has, to my knowledge, ever described O'Connor, Souter or Kennedy as a "pit bull" in whatever size their shoes are.
Huh? Lawyers with partners are homosexual? Who knew?
Frum is an ass. Is it so difficult for him to imagine that someone's thinking can legitimately change over a period of years? That "vapors" and blandishments and pressure are the only conceivable reasons why a Justice might disagree with him?
I guess he utterly rejects the idea that he himself could be mistaken about anything, and so might reconsider at some point.
However, all this makes me happy- I have far better credentials than she does. All I need to do is find some political up and comer and ride the coattails to the Supreme Court.
I mean come on, SMU is a second-tier school, and, based on the lack of crowing about how she was top of the class or whatnot, I have to conclude that she was nowhere near it.
I'm somewhat skeptical that somebody who has been a practicing lawyer and/or involved in politics for thirty plus years is going to suddenly be exposed to new rational arguments advancing the liberal point of view. New forms of peer/media pressure, on the other hand...
The managerial skills involved in rising to the top of the heap at a Dallas law firm don't really have a whole lot to do with the ideal SCOTUS skill set.
Y'all (well, some of you, anyway)are slandering Souter, who was and is a good judge. We could be talking more like Blackmun here.
Or then again, maybe not. The whole point is no one knows.
Except that was not the objective meaning of the post I read. At all. That poster put "partner" in quotations to make a point, not to quote a third-party speaker. I should have used 'partner' instead of "partner" to convey that. This person, who claimed to have been in attendance at the meeting, intended to convey that Miers was a lesbian. All it would take is some investigative reporting. If we can find out that Douglas Ginsburg smoked pot, we can find out who Miers' 'partner' is, right?
Unfortunately, I cannot find the link, but I think it was at confirmthem.com. You can read it for yourself.
That pretty sums up what everyone here in Dallas has to say about her.
since when have we started assessing sc candidates on whether they are ugly. this is ridiculous.
No, but it does speak against Frum's concerns that Miers will be so, so taut and nervous that she'll give up her convictions to impress the
captain of the football teamerm, Harvard and Yale and the media, no? I can't imagine that rising to the top of a law firm requires wimpiness.There's a lot of questions about Miers, but really, it's a bit of a stretch to think that she's a shrinking violet who just wants the boys to like her.
Why would Bush squander a Supreme Court nomination with a nominee who will infuriate his social conservative base? Why would he squander nomination by picking a nominee who will be helpful on a single, narrow issue like war on terror issues?
As to the drift of justices to the left, if true, then perhaps it'd due to "wisdom guided by experience" as N.W. might say.
And, SP, Miers might deserve criticism, but no one deserves slander.
Good. Make her WH Counsel. But SCOTUS?
Silly me, here I thought that judges were supposed to interpret the law and the Constitution, not decide whether the outcome of a particular policy is desirable or not.
In my book, Bush is 0-2 in appointing justices like Scalia and Thomas (Thomas being my favorite justice). Bush has been a major disappointment for conservatives.
Um, I distinctly remember women talking about how "hot" John Roberts is. It's ok when women do it, but not men? How sexist, Therese!
I suppose the word of Judge Nathan Hecht has no weight with David Frum. See: http://www.worldmagblog.com/blog/
True. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg is personally very very close to Scalia, the "Hecht" of the U.S. Supreme Court
Good point, although I don’t think it’s so much that they “preach to the choir” as it is that students often times don’t challenge the things they hear because (a) they’re very little benefit into getting into an argument in the classroom (aside form honing your debate skills) and (b) students are generally at a disadvantage in arguing with someone who is more familiar with the material even if they might be making a bad argument which a less experienced student may not feel confident in challenging.
I hope that the Supreme Court can make room for someone who is not a graduate of Harvardyalevirginiastanfordchicago School of Law. SMC isn't Cooley. And I wouldn't mind seeing a Cooley grad on SCOTUS in any event. I work at a "major research university," and I've come to the conclusion that intellect is overrated. Vastly.
So: If John Paul Stevens retires, let's have Quayle! IU Indianapolis Law School deserves a spot on the bench.
My biggest concern with Miers is that she is a Protestant. Right now there are 5 Catholics among the Supremes. Isn't it written somewhere that we RC's get a majority of seats on SCOTUS? (Or was that an emanating penumbra?) I mean, after Griswold, you gotta give us something.
And even Christ was 33, male, and single. ;) At a time when all of that would have been *very*, um... noticable.
The press is more like an intelligence gathering organization these days. After Bernstein &Woodward, "source journalism" became the main flavor, at which point you want your
molessources to promote as much as possible.This explains two things: A) The extreme press loathing for a possible Perot Administration, as they had no idea who the old coot would appoint
and thus journos might have to work for a living instead of having constant expense account lunches with "sources". B) In a sidelight, the constant civil war over at CIA, where the intel guys who want stability for their sources always argue for stability, and the ops guys who want to play with their toys always argue for more ops, which are inherently unstable.