The Miers Rebellion

It's almost as though Bush had the gee-whiz guys at the Pentagon create a gun that would automatically target his own foot.

Arlen Specter, head of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which will be handing the hearings for the Miers nomination: "She definitely has to establish herself. It's become even more emphatic in my mind as to her need to bone up on constitutional law."

Really? You think that a SCOTUS judge should be familiar with the last two hundred years of legal reasoning on the legal charter of the United States?

Actually, probably not. I suspect that Bush doesn't give much credence to such things as the legal tradition of the Constitution, and he's probably happy as a clam to send someone to highest court in the land who's never studied the cases that will ground the decisions she will be called on to make. In other words, she could upend US history out of naivete, which one could argue is Bush's own strategy as President.

The Post talks about the leading lights of the conservative movement who have called for her nomination to be withdrawn:

Just yesterday, columnist Charles Krauthammer and Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol called on Bush to withdraw the Miers nomination, with Krauthammer deriding her selection as "scandalous" and "a joke." Another icon of the conservative movement, former judge Robert H. Bork, denounced it as "a disaster on every level."

I just can't figure out what Bush's strategy is with Miers. He expected her to be a stealth candidate he could slide past Democrats. Instead, he's pushing on his own party that she's a stealth candidate who must be confirmed because of her evangelical faith (religious test, anyone?).

Party activists believe that they've put the time and energy in and won the elections that empower them to send up a nominee who will tell the Senate Judicial Committee, "I will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade every chance I get," and "The American people have no right of privacy in our constitution, even with the numerous protections afforded the mechanistic acts such as voting, assembly, and speech that arise from the private act of inquiry." (Okay, such a nominee wouldn't say that. She or he might even say the exact opposite, but would then rule that way.)

But party activists have to know that overturning Roe and telling America that there's no right to privacy is an election loser. I can't help but feel that Bush has chosen Miers because he knows that she knows the political ramifications of surrendering the abortion issue. The GOP would be out of power for decades, and I think Bush is intent on supplying a nominee who understands that the most important issue facing America is the continuation of disasterous one-partyism.

Posted by shamanic at October 8, 2005 11:52 AM | TrackBack