Juridics : US Supreme Court: Harriet Miers' nomination stirs up strong, usually blinkered opinion

Reporter Dante Chinni ("Why many conservatives misjudge Bush's choice," CSM, click title above) recounts the development of an outspoken narcissistic conservative reaction to the Prez nomination of Harriet Miers. A clip from Chinni's text follows with my comments interspersed in brackets:

What has been harder to grasp in the past week is the anger from the political right on Miers not being conservative enough. The Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol was "disappointed, depressed and demoralized."

[First time I've had a view of Kristol with wits lost, the dean of neo-cons now in devolution to pudding in a way that has little to do with "the Bush Revolution in foreign policy" which K had critically support, most of the time- the neo-Wilsonian revolution in foreign policy I had thawt was the foundation of neo-con strategic thinking about American's role in the wide world bedevilled by terrorism these days. Was/is Kristol simply spoiling for an all-out polarization, an all-out Left vs Rite fite to recap the last election, all this around Bush's second Supreme Court nomination? Shame on Billy K! - Owlb]

Rush Limbaugh was uneasy on his radio show in an interview with Vice President Cheney.

[Never heard the guy's radio show, but maybe RL has gotten a more nuanced analysis of the value of this nomination in the meantime since he had interviewed the pokerish VP. - Owlb]

Many want her nomination withdrawn. [Ain't gonna happen, and the "want" is not well-motivated, unethical, on the part of the gang on the Rite advocating a dump of Miers. Keep her on the programme! Let this play out as it will reveal as much about the Left and this mean-spirited element of the Rite, as it will tell us about the nominee herself. - Owlb]

They want a more conservative nominee in the mold of Justice Scalia or Justice Thomas. They've been waiting a long time for this opportunity to get "their" court and they don't like the way this is unfolding. [They want ... They've been waiting ... they don't like .... that's their problem, not Bush's, the Senate's, or the nation's.]

That's reasonable, of course,

[No, it's not reasonable. The Constitution does not give the President's erstwhile supportive groups the task of "advise and consent." The groups, their leaders and the punditocracy that eggs them on, simply have no constitutional standing to determine the nominations, or to decide the Prez's strategy in putting a nomination forward to the Senate in these days. Many of these bitching and whining gentlemen (a few ladies, too, I would imagine) have been sniping at Bush for a long time, are part of the problem generally of an over-politicized Supreme Court nomination process and are not part of the solution, pretend they own the voters they may have influenced (they seem to regard the voters merely as manipulated and further manipulable targets who actually are presumed incapable of taking responsiblity for their vote for Bush in the last round ... when they give him the constitutional authority to nominate and seek the Senate's "advice and consent"). On the litmus test of abortion, many of these voices are simply exploiters of a woman's dilemma's once she's pregnant and may think an(other) baby is an unbearable prospect - that's why so many of this gang are absolutists and want absolutist prefab Justices who won't work to ameliorate the Roe vs Wad expansionary situation. Rather, they should support a Justice who follows the Laura Bush doctrine that at least points to a modicum of compassion in certain Court-specified circumstances. A Supreme Court that would enfroce legislated bans on Partial-Birth Abortions within a year's time would be a great incremental advance, for instance. Those who want all or nothing are playing a dangerous game. - Owlb]

if you are on the political right

[It's not reasonable no matter with what wing you fly ... a Supreme Court nomination is not a case of "Birds of a feather flock together."]

- to want a more conservative nominee, to want another Scalia or Thomas,

[This type of absolutist conservative wants Scalia/Thomas clones and isn't getting one from Bush - good! They back cloneyism! - Owlb]

to want to get what they've waited for so long. But wanting is about wishing, not reality. And the reality in Washington right now is that over the past few months the temperature has changed where the Bush administration is concerned.

The latter point is the point. Bush correctly discerned that he couldn't draw the lines from dot to dot of the testy conservatives' fanciful pictures of a Court prefabricated to the dimensions of their absolutist dementia. - Owlb


•Prez says religon a criterion for selecting Miers for hi court

Bush didn't actually say what the headline writer claims and places above reporter Nedra Pickler's AP article.

"People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers," Bush told reporters at the White House. "They want to know Harriet Miers' background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. And part of Harriet Miers' life is her religion."

Bush ... said that his advisers were reaching out to conservatives who oppose her nomination "just to explain the facts."

But here Bush is apprpriately disengenuous in not pointing out the sociological-jurdical vital significance of appointing a persons who

1.) is an Evangelical Christian, a huge community in the USA much larger than the Catholic population, let alone the Jewish, Buddhist. Islamic and secularist demographics represented or not, on the Court; while there won't be another Black or a Hispanic on the Court as a result of the coming Miers confirmation, also there won't be another non-Evangelical, another man, another law-scholar rather than lawyer, another justice ignorant of business law - with which all the latter sociological categories the present Court is stacked;

2.) is a woman, and one who would not allow Ruth Bader Ginsbug, a radical feminist on abortion and many other life-issues, to have a monopoly of representing the diverse female half of America's population;

3.) is a lawyer who brings knowledge of the reality of court cases, suits, prosecutions, and defenses to the bench of the Supreme Court where experience as a practicing loawyer is distinctly lacking at present; in addition, Miers is an Evangelical Christian woman who has broken thru the lawyerly barriers to become President of the Texas Bar Association and has been named as one of the top 100% lawyers in the country by the American Bar Assocation;

and 4.) would bring enormous knowledge of the complexities of business law in the 50 states and the jurisdictional issues each has, and cumulatively, with Federal business law - something that is also grievously lacking among the present membership of the Supreme Court which just recently approved a hideous precedent on Eminent Domain that allows political jurisdictions to conspire with mega-stores and institutions to take the properties of a neighbourhood of home-owners, for the profit and benefit of others.

• Bush's unconventional choice

A key Democrat, no friend of Bush, has recommended Harriet Miers, that Democrat being no less than Senate minority leader, Harry Reid. "Senator Reid, in fact, acknowledges that he recommended Miers for the nomination." Further, "In a statement after Bush's announcement, Reid said, '... the Supreme Court would benefit from the addition of a justice who has real experience as a practicing lawyer,'" according to CSM's reporter Linda Feldmann and her co-authors (Feldmann is one of my favourite daily newspaper journalists.

The following text brings out the professional, sociological, and political aspects of Miers' nomination, but it still misses the key religio-sociological-demograqphic factor embedded in Bush's notice that the huge Evangelical Christian community is grossly under-represented on the Supreme Court due to blindspots governing previous appointments. Such a religiodemographic presence in the membership of the Court is necessary, I would argue, because, inter alia the other woman on the present Court is devoted to the abortionist ideology pure and simple, which presumably Miers would not be, no knee-jerk support for the unfettered ultra-feminist KillBabiesAsYouPlease stance - with an entire abortion industry to back it. Also, were Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia to influence the Court to adopt a less than 100% reaffirmation of the until-now expanding application of Roe vs Wade (for instance, the presently expanding legitmation of chopping viable babies into pieces within the womb to abort them with "greater ease" very late in a pregnancy), then a significant advance would be made. And with Miers among the Justices, we could perhaps be spared a Catholics-only duo (Roberts, Scalia) judging in a way supportive of the restraints-on-abortion faith-constituencies in the USA. An Evangelical woman strengthens the possiblity of halting the expansion of Roe vs Wade around a hedonistic doctrine of a pregnant woman's pleasure to abort at any stage or state of her pregnancy. A good possbility is that Laura Bush's rubric that "abortion should be legal, but rare" may well be what guides Miers' judicial philosophy on this de facto litmus test for Supreme Court appointments, a stealth test applied by both radical Liberals and some absolutist pro-life Conservatives, pulling the law in opposite absolutist directions.

While it's true. says Feldman. that

Harriet Miers, the White House counsel, has never been a judge and is not a recognized expert on constitutional law, in sharp contrast to the new chief justice, John Roberts. Still, she has diverse experience, including many years in private law practice, and political experience that none of the sitting justices has, both as a member of the Dallas City Council and, for the past five years, as a member of Mr. Bush's White House inner circle. Before being named counsel 10 months ago, Ms. Miers had served as assistant to the president, staff secretary, and deputy chief of staff.

As the replacement for the retiring Sandra Day O'Connor, the first woman justice, Miers would maintain the presence of two women on the court, and perhaps also present a counterweight to the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

• Conservatives split, strong voices against Miers

This Voice of America radio-broadcast text by Steve Ember says Miers has been making the rounds of Senators on behalf of her confirmation as a Justice of the Supreme Court.

Miz Miers is sixty years old. She is from Texas. She received her bachelor’s and law degrees from Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Miz Miers has received high praise as a lawyer. She was the first woman president of the Dallas Bar Association. Later she became the first woman president of the Texas State Bar Association. The National Law Journal has named her among the one hundred most powerful lawyers in the nation, and the top fifty women lawyers.

Dallas voters elected her to a two-year term on the City Council.

Some critics say her loyalty to the president could present a conflict of interest on future court decisions. Harriet Miers worked for Mister Bush when he was elected governor of Texas. She joined the White House in two thousand one as an assistant to the president. She has served as his personal lawyer since February.

Besides the near-excellent thumbnail bio, this article makes another important point, in my opinion. This point certainly is important to me personally.

This week, the court heard arguments about cases including one about the rights of the dying. The Bush administration wants to punish doctors in the state of Oregon who help patients end their lives. This assistance is currently legal under state law.

Lacking a family for whom to hang around when my life is no longer viable in my considered judgement. I'm hopeful that I can be assisted by a medical doctor and a clergyman of my choosing to terminate my earthly pilgrimage, enter the Interim State, and await the coming of the Lord Jesus in my dreamings, to prepare me for everlasting life under His Rule on the New Earth, according to the Biblical idea of "asleep in Jesus." My variation from Calvin, usual Reformed thinking, and the Evangelical Christian mainstream, has to do with what nowadays happens to people like me when we grow too old and are institutionalized, with only complete strangers around us/me, and bossed by caretakers who have no affinity to us/me, who watch the clock, who all too often neglect and abuse us/me. A compassionate conservative on the Supreme Court mite fathom the implications of these changed conditions in comparison to yesteryear, at least for family-less folk like us/me. Harriet Miers may just be such a Justice when the time comes for us/me "to shuffle off this mortal coil." - Owlb