Commentators on the right are continuing to speak out against the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. First, Ann Coulter has this to say.
I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush’s real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.
Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney’s many virtues — loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture …
And as for the argument that we should trust the President to make the right selection:
Bush has no right to say “Trust me.” He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years. Among the coalitions that elected Bush are people who have been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. While Bush was still boozing it up in the early ’80s, Ed Meese, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and all the founders of the Federalist Society began creating a farm team of massive legal talent on the right.
But here’s the money quote:
However nice, helpful, prompt and tidy she is, Harriet Miers isn’t qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on “The West Wing,” let alone to be a real one. Both Republicans and Democrats should be alarmed that Bush seems to believe his power to appoint judges is absolute. This is what “advice and consent” means.
In today’s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer calls on the President to withdrawn the nomination.
There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvie Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous.
It will be argued that this criticism is elitist. But this is not about the Ivy League. The issue is not the venue of Miers’s constitutional scholarship, experience and engagement. The issue is their nonexistence.
Moreover, the Supreme Court is an elite institution. It is not one of the “popular” branches of government. That is the reason Sen. Roman Hruska achieved such unsought immortality when he declared, in support of an undistinguished Nixon nominee to the court, that, yes, G. Harrold Carswell is a mediocrity but mediocre Americans deserve representation on the court as well.
Meanwhile, the Washington Times reports that Democrats have decided to hold their fire on Miers and let the GOP fight amongst itself.
Update: Virginia Postrel makes this excellent point about this whole mess
Harriet Miers’s academic record, as I’ve written, suggests that she is very smart and was a hard working, serious student. There are lots of other equally smart, equally hard working graduates of hundreds of different law schools. That doesn’t make them Supreme Court material. If Miers had a record as a constitutional lawyer, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Previous Posts:
Solving The Miers Puzzle
Publius v. Harriet Miers
Why Harriet ?
Harriet Who ?
