That was the reaction I had when I heard Monday morning that President Bush had nominated Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the United States Supreme Court. Now, after being able to absorb a few days of news and commentary my reaction is — are you kidding me ?
Miers appears to be a very good lawyer, and there is no requirement that a Supreme Court Justice have any judicial experience, or even that there be a lawyer, but the only qualification I can see Miers has is that she’s a friend of the President’s. With all of the names that have been mentioned since O’Connor’s resignation in June and everything that happened during the Roberts nomination, why did Bush nominate this person ? In his news conference yesterday, he basically asked his supporters to trust him that he has selected a nominee that has the proper view of the Constitution and the role of the courts, but trust only goes so far and Bush has used up alot of it lately.
John Roberts was a blank slate and a risky appointment in many ways. He could turn out to be another David Souter or, worse, Earl Warren, but at least there is no question that he was absolutely qualified to be first Associate Justice and then Chief Justice. In some sense, that was reassuring and one only hopes that he will do the right thing. There is no similar reassurance in the case of Harriet Miers. The one thing that conservative supporters of the President have cited in the past two days as evidence of her bona fides is her membership in a very conservative evangelical church — but that only leads to the possibility that she will be an anti-abortion zealot opposed to the separate of church and state. No, this is not a good appointment in the least.
I’m not sure what Bush thought he was accomplishing with this appointment, but the pundits are not happy. Michelle Malkin has weighed in with her own serious doubts about the nomination. Stephen Green at Vodkapundit has an excellent point of his own:
[W]e’re being asked to take Miers on faith ? the same faith Bush held in Norm Mineta, George Tenet, and Michael Brown.
And Ann Althouse has this to say:
My problem isn’t with her lack of judicial experience, it’s that there are no elite credentials of the sort that say this is a superior intellect — a mind that should decide the most important issues for us over a period of decades! If you think about it that way, her nomination is an absurd imposition on us by the President.
And, over at the Washington Post, George Will unloads this attack on the President’s selection:
It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court’s tasks. The president’s “argument” for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.
He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.
Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers’s nomination resulted from the president’s careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers’s name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.
In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the constitution. The forfeiture occurred March 27, 2002, when, in a private act betokening an uneasy conscience, he signed the McCain-Feingold law expanding government regulation of the timing, quantity and content of political speech. The day before the 2000 Iowa caucuses he was asked — to ensure a considered response from him, he had been told in advance that he would be asked — whether McCain-Feingold’s core purposes are unconstitutional. He unhesitatingly said, “I agree.” Asked if he thought presidents have a duty, pursuant to their oath to defend the Constitution, to make an independent judgment about the constitutionality of bills and to veto those he thinks unconstitutional, he briskly said, “I do.”
The initial reaction to the Miers nomination is sounding like a revolt on the right that the Bush Administration may be unable to control.
