Harriet Miers Should Be Defeated
The just-released statement of Senator I'm-Running-For-The-2008-GOP-Presidential-Nomination (R-Wherever):
Yes, the above is fictional. Also a pipedream. Harriet Miers will almost certainly be confirmed as Sanda Day O'Connor's replacement. But I, like the hypothetical Republican senator/presidential wannabe above, have concluded that her nomination should be rejected instead.
This conclusion came as something of an epiphany yesterday afternoon as I was mulling over my astonishment that the same president who chose the most qualified individual in the country for his first SCOTUS appointment could possibly follow that up with what Ann Coulter yesterday aptly described as "a complete mediocrity." I've thought about it and thought about it and I just can't make head or tails of it. The two choices just don't go together.
How could Bush fail to learn a blessed thing from his Roberts home run? Send up a brilliant, judicious, poised, accomplished constitutionalist whose qualifications for Olympus are so overpowering as to be inarguable even by the DisLoyal Opposition, have him/her conduct themselves with patient, respectful civility in their confirmation hearings as partisan hacks like Schumer, Biden, Kennedy et al indulge in the assholery that comes so naturally to them, and split the frustrated Dem caucus right down the middle. The Dems guarantee pre-emptively to filibuster the next nominee? So what? Another Roberts-class choice would certainly convince at least two of the seven McCain Mutineers to back resort to the Byrd Option, end confirmation filibusters for good, and turn the process of re-constitutionalizing the federal bench into an assembly line.
The Roberts pick demonstrated once and for all that this president can appoint and get confirmed constitutionalist judges to the Supreme Court in this Congress. So, with a well-stocked "bench" of constitutionalist talent of the Chief Justice's calibre to choose from, why in the blue hell did he make his next pick his own personal Church Lady?
I can only conclude, since neither he nor anybody else who is trying to come up with tortured, grasping, tangential-to-the-point-of-irrelevance defenses of "Justice Miers" (and all of them boiling down to "trust W") can point to anything objective or substantive to indicate that she is either qualified or an originalist, that he really isn't committed - or isn't committed anymore - to appointing constitutionalists to the federal bench. At the very least, not when doing so could involve political cost and/or political combat.
Coming on the heels of his caving to opposition demands that he take the blame for state and local post-Katrina failures, and then scapegoating and firing his FEMA director, and then proposing the "New New Deal" to rebuild the Gulf Coast without also proposing spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget to pay for it, the Miers nomination is quickly becoming a "last straw" moment.
Several years ago there was a St. Louis Cardinals pitcher named Rick Ankiel who had been a servicable, quality starter for a number of seasons. Then, suddenly and with no warning, he lost his "stuff." Completely. Couldn't find the strike zone anymore. Couldn't get anybody out. A total disaster. The Cardinals coaching staff tried everything to help him - disassembled and reassembled his mechanics, gave him a complete physical exam, sent him to a sports psychologist, even optioned him to the minor leagues to reduce the pressure on him. None of it worked. He was healthy, his head was on straight, and he was pitching the same way he always had. He just sucked, and he couldn't get it back.
That's what George W. Bush reminds me of right now. For four and a half years he had great "stuff." Everything he did was golden. Outfoxed the Democrats at every turn. Accomplished things (two tax cuts, getting Social Security private accounts over, the liberation of Iraq) thought to be impossible. Got re-elected in the teeth of the ferocious extreme left and their tsunami of campaign cash. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and for whatever reason it rattled Dubya as nothing, not even 9/11, had before, and now he's morphed into a hideous cross between his father and Gerald Ford.
This, it seems to me, is a portent of disaster in next year's mid-term elections. Remember, the success the GOP has enjoyed in the past three election cycles has all revolved around its unparalled "ground [i.e. GOTV] game," and that has been fueled by (1) loyalty to Bush and (2) the judges issue. With Bush now having kissed off the Republican base via the judges issue, just exactly where is that maximized center-right turnout going to come from?
Yesterday afternoon - and then reinforced by George Will's missive last night - it hit me: by voting down Harriet Miers.
It makes such perfect sense. Bush is a lame duck anyway, and the issues where he crosses the base - immigration, federal spending - which the White House has managed to keep a lid on before now have risen to boiling level, and the Miers betrayal has blown off the lid. Consequently, any GOP senator who is eyeing a presidential run in 2008 - Bill Frist, George Allen, and especially John McCain - can become a hero to the base by riding to the rescue of the President's better judgment and leading the move to defeat this misbegotten nomination and compel the President to pick somebody else that we all assumed he'd choose in the first place.
McCain did it already on federal spending. If he and/or his rivals for the '08 nomination led the charge to defeat Miers, it could erase the stain of "Sailor's" "memo of understanding" debacle and cement him/them as frontrunners with enthusiastic conservative support.
Besides, it's not as if Darth Queeg and Fristy haven't broken with the President before on other issues. At least this time they'd be breaking to his right for a change. And they're going to have to separate their interests from his sooner or later anyway.
Given the direction Dubya's fortunes appear headed, there's no time like the present.
UPDATE: Trent Lott isn't running in '08 that I know of, but he's fired a shot across the White House bow.
After careful reflection and consideration over the past couple of days, I have, regretfully, come to the conclusion that I cannot support the President's nomination of Harriet Miers to be the next Associate Justice on the United States Supreme Court.
Though it is certainly the President's prerogative to select whomever he wants for any given office, elevation to the federal judiciary, and especially the High Court, is a decision that I believe requires a higher standard of consideration than that of determining the staffing of Executive Branch positions. This is why the Founding Fathers, in their originalist wisdom, gave the U.S. Senate its "advice and consent" role in the nomination/confirmation process - to provide "an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and....prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity."
These, and not ideology or judicial philosophy, as my distinguished colleague Senator Schumer believes, are the criteria handed down to us as U.S. senators to evaluate the fitness of nominees appointed to the highest court in the land. And by these criteria I find Ms. Miers to be wanting.
I have met with her, talked with her at length, and she is a fine, upstanding person and what might be called a "crackerjack," and definitely trail-blazing, attorney who has risen through "glass ceilings" to the top levels of the White House. She has also been closely involved with the selection process that has produced a long series of outstanding appellate court choices culminating in the elevation of John Roberts as Chief Justice, all of which have received my enthusiastic endorsement and vote.
But I find no convincing evidence that Ms. Miers herself is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks.
I urge my colleagues to, to paraphrase Alexander Hamilton, "operate as a barrier to a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public." And I urge the President to return to the standard of excellence set by his nomination of Chief Justice Roberts in choosing a replacement for Ms. Miers.
Yes, the above is fictional. Also a pipedream. Harriet Miers will almost certainly be confirmed as Sanda Day O'Connor's replacement. But I, like the hypothetical Republican senator/presidential wannabe above, have concluded that her nomination should be rejected instead.
This conclusion came as something of an epiphany yesterday afternoon as I was mulling over my astonishment that the same president who chose the most qualified individual in the country for his first SCOTUS appointment could possibly follow that up with what Ann Coulter yesterday aptly described as "a complete mediocrity." I've thought about it and thought about it and I just can't make head or tails of it. The two choices just don't go together.
How could Bush fail to learn a blessed thing from his Roberts home run? Send up a brilliant, judicious, poised, accomplished constitutionalist whose qualifications for Olympus are so overpowering as to be inarguable even by the DisLoyal Opposition, have him/her conduct themselves with patient, respectful civility in their confirmation hearings as partisan hacks like Schumer, Biden, Kennedy et al indulge in the assholery that comes so naturally to them, and split the frustrated Dem caucus right down the middle. The Dems guarantee pre-emptively to filibuster the next nominee? So what? Another Roberts-class choice would certainly convince at least two of the seven McCain Mutineers to back resort to the Byrd Option, end confirmation filibusters for good, and turn the process of re-constitutionalizing the federal bench into an assembly line.
The Roberts pick demonstrated once and for all that this president can appoint and get confirmed constitutionalist judges to the Supreme Court in this Congress. So, with a well-stocked "bench" of constitutionalist talent of the Chief Justice's calibre to choose from, why in the blue hell did he make his next pick his own personal Church Lady?
I can only conclude, since neither he nor anybody else who is trying to come up with tortured, grasping, tangential-to-the-point-of-irrelevance defenses of "Justice Miers" (and all of them boiling down to "trust W") can point to anything objective or substantive to indicate that she is either qualified or an originalist, that he really isn't committed - or isn't committed anymore - to appointing constitutionalists to the federal bench. At the very least, not when doing so could involve political cost and/or political combat.
Coming on the heels of his caving to opposition demands that he take the blame for state and local post-Katrina failures, and then scapegoating and firing his FEMA director, and then proposing the "New New Deal" to rebuild the Gulf Coast without also proposing spending cuts elsewhere in the federal budget to pay for it, the Miers nomination is quickly becoming a "last straw" moment.
Several years ago there was a St. Louis Cardinals pitcher named Rick Ankiel who had been a servicable, quality starter for a number of seasons. Then, suddenly and with no warning, he lost his "stuff." Completely. Couldn't find the strike zone anymore. Couldn't get anybody out. A total disaster. The Cardinals coaching staff tried everything to help him - disassembled and reassembled his mechanics, gave him a complete physical exam, sent him to a sports psychologist, even optioned him to the minor leagues to reduce the pressure on him. None of it worked. He was healthy, his head was on straight, and he was pitching the same way he always had. He just sucked, and he couldn't get it back.
That's what George W. Bush reminds me of right now. For four and a half years he had great "stuff." Everything he did was golden. Outfoxed the Democrats at every turn. Accomplished things (two tax cuts, getting Social Security private accounts over, the liberation of Iraq) thought to be impossible. Got re-elected in the teeth of the ferocious extreme left and their tsunami of campaign cash. Then came Hurricane Katrina, and for whatever reason it rattled Dubya as nothing, not even 9/11, had before, and now he's morphed into a hideous cross between his father and Gerald Ford.
This, it seems to me, is a portent of disaster in next year's mid-term elections. Remember, the success the GOP has enjoyed in the past three election cycles has all revolved around its unparalled "ground [i.e. GOTV] game," and that has been fueled by (1) loyalty to Bush and (2) the judges issue. With Bush now having kissed off the Republican base via the judges issue, just exactly where is that maximized center-right turnout going to come from?
Yesterday afternoon - and then reinforced by George Will's missive last night - it hit me: by voting down Harriet Miers.
It makes such perfect sense. Bush is a lame duck anyway, and the issues where he crosses the base - immigration, federal spending - which the White House has managed to keep a lid on before now have risen to boiling level, and the Miers betrayal has blown off the lid. Consequently, any GOP senator who is eyeing a presidential run in 2008 - Bill Frist, George Allen, and especially John McCain - can become a hero to the base by riding to the rescue of the President's better judgment and leading the move to defeat this misbegotten nomination and compel the President to pick somebody else that we all assumed he'd choose in the first place.
McCain did it already on federal spending. If he and/or his rivals for the '08 nomination led the charge to defeat Miers, it could erase the stain of "Sailor's" "memo of understanding" debacle and cement him/them as frontrunners with enthusiastic conservative support.
Besides, it's not as if Darth Queeg and Fristy haven't broken with the President before on other issues. At least this time they'd be breaking to his right for a change. And they're going to have to separate their interests from his sooner or later anyway.
Given the direction Dubya's fortunes appear headed, there's no time like the present.
UPDATE: Trent Lott isn't running in '08 that I know of, but he's fired a shot across the White House bow.
posted by JASmius at 8:35 AM
<<< Home