Like A Lamb To The Slaughter

Ron Key, the minister of Harriet Miers' church, asked her fellow congregants to pray for her as she prepares for public scrutiny and intense political debate over her nomination to the Supreme Court.

That was a very kind, thoughtful, and generous gesture for Pastor Key to make. Especially as it's looking from various senate reactions like she's going to need every heavenward supplication she can get.

Perhaps this is as good a time as any to say this, so here goes: I have no particular animus toward Harriet Miers herself. I just don't think she's qualified to sit on the Supreme Court, and doesn't have the grounding in constitutionalism that the President promised his base supporters would be integral to his SCOTUS picks. It's not her fault he dubbed her for the O'Connor seat (though it is that she foolishly accepted, although I also imagine that just about any President of the United States is awfully difficult to say no to). My ire is far more directed at Dubya himself for this inexplicable betrayal; Ms. Miers is just the unfortunate lightning rod.

Her eventual appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee may be politically akin to what Christians of the first three centuries of the Church era encountered in the Roman Colisseum - a blur of hostile, hungry predators, fangs bared. Only this time they'd be coming from all sides with nobody but the Bushies themselves to back her up.

Miers started making the rounds on the Hill late last week with what the White House must have been hoping would be friendly faces on the GOP side. Unfortunately, she wasn't very impressive in her attempts to win them over:

Miers spent the day meeting with some of the Senate Judiciary Committee's conservatives, including Jon Kyl of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Sam Brownback of Kansas.

Brownback, who is expected to make a bid for the presidency in 2008 as an anti-abortion candidate, said he is prepared to vote against Miers if he finds out he disagrees with her judicial philosophy. But he said he needs more information.

"That portrait is just now taking shape, and I'm not ready to make a call until that portrait is done," he said.

He said he has not received any White House assurances regarding Miers' judicial views, and that she refused to take a position when he asked her about the 1965 Supreme Court ruling in Griswold v. Connecticut that established the right of privacy in the sale and use of contraceptives.

"She did not take a position on it, nor did she say she would take a position on it, nor did she think it appropriate to have a position on it," Brownback said.

Yes, that's exactly the sort of stance John Roberts took. What's telling is that with Roberts it was almost exclusively the Democrats who are trying to make the now-Chief Justice tip his hand on cases that might come before him. With Miers it is conservative Republicans who feel the need to fill in those gargantuan gaps in her philosophical pedigree.

Brownback seemed to grow more underwhelmed as the day went on:

Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback has said he would consider voting against the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court even if President Bush made a personal plea for his support....

He did meet with the nominee that afternoon – and evidently was less than thrilled about what he heard.

Brownback complained that he was left trying "to gather little pieces of shreds of evidence” about Miers’ views on abortion and other issues, including gay marriage and the role of religion in public life, the New York Times reports.

I don't know how influential Senator Brownback is amongst his fellow Pachyderms, but he is a potential 2008 presidential candidate (not much of one - probably the next cycle's answer to Gary Bauer in 2000, but still....). And as I speculated last week, any GOP senator with White House aspirations (whose name isn't John McCain) will hardly be able to fail to recognize the opportunity to curry favor with the party's conservative base by shooting down the bait & switch nomination that has so angered it.

Meanwhile, Democrats were sitting back and enjoying the right-wing crackup the President had stupidly ignited. And I, for one, really can't blame them:

Senator Charles Schumer of New York said Miers is not conservative enough to please the "extreme wing" of the GOP and Senator Barbara Mikulski of Maryland charged that some of the conservatives disenchanted with the Miers pick are "incredibly sexist."...

"I'm shocked at the sexism and double-standard coming out of the far right," Mikulski said.

"All of a sudden they're saying that a woman who was able to become head of the Texas Bar Association isn't qualified? They're saying a woman who was one of the first to head up a major law firm with over 400 lawyers doesn't have intellectual heft?," Mikulski concluded. "I find this a double standard. I find it incredibly sexist."

Thank you, Ed Gillespie.

While Maryland's answer to Jabba the Hut was getting her material from top GOP operatives, Chucky was citing Bush himself as "proof" of his ludicrous claims of where the American "mainstream" resides:

"I think that the hard, the extreme wing of the Republican Party was demanding that the President appoint somebody who had openly shown fealty to their viewpoints," Schumer charged. "But the President knew darned well that that would be way out of synch with what America wants and so the President had to go with a stealth candidate."

Thank you, W. With a single nomination you have lent vindication to every judge-related mendacity that has seeped forth from the maw of the smearer of Michael Steele over the past
four and a half years.

And then, of all left-wing scumbag bomb-throwers, came Tom Harkin to defend Ms. Miers' honor:

"All the trashing is coming from the right wing of the Republican Party," Senator Tom Harkin, D-IA, said in a conference call with reporters. "I really think it's despicable what they're doing."

I'll just bet he does. We say Ms. Miers is unqualifed mystery meat and a craven choice by a heretofore courageous president; they tried to tar John Roberts as a racist, kidnapper and wife-beater. Yeah, Harken knows "despicable" alright.

This paragraph from the linked Harken quote article ought to be, despite all the fawning Dem praise for Miers, very ominous for the White House:

Galling to many conservatives is that Senate Minority leader Harry Reid of Nevada recommended that Bush nominate Miers and has praised her several times since then without actually promising to vote for her. [emphasis added]

Here's another:

Democrats are preparing to blanket the White House with document requests to help flesh out Miers' judicial philosophy. However, her work there would fall under executive privilege or lawyer-client privilege.

Again, just as with Roberts. Only this time it may be different, and that difference would be that Miers, unlike Roberts, does not enjoy solid GOP support:

Democrats are keying on demands by conservatives that Miers be forthcoming at her confirmation hearings. Last month, the court's new chief justice, John Roberts, had solid support from conservatives when he declined to answer many questions from Democrats. This time, Democrats hope Miers will feel pressured to be more open.

You know the saying - try to be all things to all people - or try to avoid offending anybody - and you'll end up pleasing nobody. If that happens to Ms. Miers, the White House would have no other resort but to appealing to party loyalty, which they apparently didn't feel they had in support of a solid constitutionalist pick. How much less will they be able to crack the whip for as manifestly unimpressive as this one.

John Podhoretz sketches (though doesn't outright predict) the following scenario:

Democrats will welcome Miers with open arms in their preliminary meetings with them. They will be all lovey-dovey, and there will be public talk of how nice and good and kind and decent she is. The liberal interest groups will not go haywire. Then the hearings will begin - and at that time and only at that time, the liberal attack-dogs will pounce. They will throw out Con Law questions of wildly obscure origin. Schumer will ask her this, and Kennedy will ask her that, and if Biden can shut up long enough to actually ask a question, he will ask a third thing.

Now mark this well. Harriet Miers has never been through a confirmation hearing. They are very unpleasant experiences, and these judicial hearings are especially rough. She may get the sense from the pre-hearing chatter that she's going to have an easy time of it - until a boom is lowered on her head. One false move, one bad answer, one serious slip of the tongue, and then the head-hunting will commence. Shock will be expressed at her incapacity to answer Question A, or her inarticulate handling of Question B.

The media will do the work of the Democrats and raise all sorts of alarm bells. And suddenly the nicey-nicey stuff will turn not nicey-nicey at all. At this point the leftie groups will start to go berserk, and Dem Senators will turn on her.

And conservatives won't be there to rally around her because, as American Conservative Union head David Keane put it, "It's not [our] fight."

Will the Donks take this path? Logic would suggest that they wouldn't, since one would have to prudently reason that Harriet Miers is a lot better than they could have hoped for and they're unlikely to do any better. But Bush-hatred, not logic and reason, has driven Democrat strategy for years now, and with the President's core supporters divided over this nomination, the Dems may find the chance to humiliate GDub well-nigh irresistable. As to the possibility of that backfiring with the outstanding constitutionalist replacement that Bush should have chosen to begin with, Dems may not sweat that, since in their minds, as Senator Schumer openly boasted, they feel they forced Bush to retreat this time, and probably believe they can keep doing it. And remember, they think they've got the entire center-right on the run after the Katrina disaster. They're feeling their oats, and aren't likely to let caution or deliberation slow them down.

Seeming to already bear out the Podhoretz hypothesis, Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said this morning that he plans to take Ms. Miers to school (h/t: Powerline):

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Sunday he plans to vigorously question Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers about her qualifications because she has not proved to him she can handle the weighty issues that come before the high court. Senator Arlen Specter, R-PA, said he has questions about Miers' grasp of privacy and abortion law.

"I think she may well turn out to be the best qualified once we give her a chance to be heard," Specter said on ABC's This Week. [his nose doubtless growing right before George Stephanopoulos' eyes] "But when you deal in constitutional law, you're dealing in some very esoteric, complicated subjects that require a great deal of background."

"The jurisprudence is very complicated, and I will be pressing her very hard on these issues," he said.

I'm sure Miers' White House handlers will prepare her as best they can, but once under the proverbial 500-watt klieg lights, she may just find that a few weeks' cramming is a vastly different thing from the quarter-century immersion in constitutional law that John Roberts brought to the table.

I picture that first-season episode of the Brady Bunch where little Cindy appears on that TV quiz show and in the days leading up to the big day gets cocky, thinking she's got the material down flat. That confidence lasts right up until the little red light on the camera goes on. Then she freezes, gets the classic "deer in the headlights" expression, and completely bombs.

I would do Pastor Key one better: I would urge all evangelicals to pray for Harriet Miers - that she withdraws her name from consideration, so as to avoid the nasty debacle toward which her supposed "friend" in the big chair has thrust her.

UPDATE: Don't want to take it from me? Listen to this former Bush White House insider who emailed the following to Powerline:

I had same email that Lopez got re: Miers and Leahy [the already infamous "Where's Warren?" gaffe]. Those of us who are out of the Administration now, but who have friends involved in this Miers process are extremely disappointed. First, in the Miers pick. But that's done now; we have to move on.

Even more troubling is that the White House has set up Miers to fail, not only with conservatives, but with Democrats. The Leahy conversation was a prime example of this. Miers was never given a media/interview briefing to prepare her for such questions. Leahy's question: which Justices do you admire, is a standard one. She should have been ready for it, and she wasn't.

Why is former Senator Dan Coats serving as sherpa this time? Where is former Senator Phil Gramm? Coats deservedly earned a reputation for being someone who avoided heavy lifting during his time in the Senate, confirmed by his time as Ambassador to Germany.

Senator Gramm, on the other hand, would have been a great one to take Miers around. He would have sent a clearer message to conservatives, never mind the Texas Two-Step stories the pair would generate.

There are additional people who should be out there talking about her. For example, her first chief of staff during her time in the White House is the only one of her former chiefs of staff available for surrogate work (the others remain in Executive Branch service). He was never contacted by the White House, not even to ensure that if he didn't necessarily support her nomination he would make himself unavailable. Again, huge oversight, bad management.

All of this leads into what really bugs those of us who worked hard to keep this President in office: the nomination has the whiff of something with little thought put into it, and of a staff ill-prepared for what took place. In the end, Miers may be confirmed, but the cost - reinforcing the impression of a President and Administration politically weakened and inept - may be of far greater import to both the Republican and conservative movements.

And in the end Miers may be rejected - reinforcing the impression of a politically weakened and inept president and administration even more strongly, and all of it self-inflicted.

Brother Trunk believes that Bush may have drawn all the wrong lessons from the slam-dunk Roberts nomination:

The White House concluded that the success was due to the number of key points on which the Democrats could not fix Judge Roberts - a kind of negative capability (to misuse Keats's phrase) that he had maintained despite the length and breadth of his distinguished career. [emphasis added]

Admittedly John Roberts was just about the perfect nominee. Brilliant, poised, articulate, a walking jurisprudential encyclopedia. But he was not a tabula rasa. He didn't have an extensive paper trail, but there was enough there to reassure every conservative not named Ann Coulter that JR was a solid constitutionalist pick. And in point of fact Roberts was in the top three of every conservative wish list I saw after Justice O'Connor announced her retirement, right there with Luttig and McConnell.

Frankly I'm dubious of how important that "negative capability" ever really was. Roberts sailed to confirmation more on his dream credentials that not even the Democrats could really question than the ideological nimbleness he displayed in parrying their clumsy, intrusive interrogations. And now here comes Harriet Miers, without anything close to dream credentials or enough of a paper trail to reassure the Right, but with enough "negative capability" to power a Romulan cloaking device.

Most of us don't wear clothes to cover a different style of duds beneath the first layer. Rather, we wear clothes to cover our nakedness. The Senate Judiciary Committee is going to try to strip Harriet Miers of her professional and philosophical "clothing." If she can't prevent them from exposing her intellectual "nakedness," mightn't she pre-emptively don the coverings of the oligarchist "harlot" to save face?