Shooting Down The "Miers Opponents Are Elitists" Attack

This is another frankly astonishing red herring the pro-Miers flacks have come up with. As though educational and professional background and training - which is crucial at every other level of every other profession - is, or ought to be, not just irrelevant when it comes to Supreme Court Justices, but outright undesirable.

Jonah Goldberg gives a collective answer to this avenue of assault in the Corner:

I was rejected from every college I applied to. I was accepted at a fairly good liberal arts college largely because I had pretty good SATs and I was a male at a time when my school was going from all-female to coed. In other words, I was an affirmative action baby. If anything, I've always had a small anti-Ivy League chip on my shoulder.

While I do not like populism, I have written tens of thousands of words criticizing elite universities, elite journalism and the like. I've defended evangelical Christians more times than I can count in print, on TV and in front of liberal audiences.

I heard that Miers was nominated in the Miami airport while dancing with my daughter in a waiting area to the tunes of the Mavericks' "I want to know" playing off my laptop. My reaction then was largely what it has been in the Corner. I had no idea where she went to college when I heard the news. For all I knew she had a J.D. from Harvard and a PhD. from Yale. The idea that my reaction was based on her failure to attend these schools is (offensive) nonsense, pure and simple.

And, as I've made clear, I think it's nonsense to apply that explanation to anybody else around here, but I cannot speak to what it is in their hearts. But I honestly think that when it comes to the more righteous emailers, the fact they think this is the highest, best explanation of my reservations about Miers ultimately says more about many of them than it does about me - or any of us.

Ann Coulter also had a few things to say about this subject:

Harriet Miers went to Southern Methodist University Law School, which is not ranked at all by the serious law school reports and ranked #52 by US News
& World Report. Her greatest legal accomplishment is being the first woman commissioner of the Texas Lottery.

I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that's a good rule of thumb. But not when it comes to the Supreme Court....

One website defending Bush's choice of a graduate from an undistinguished law school complains that Miers' critics "are playing the Democrats' game," claiming that the "GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness."...Au contraire! It is conservatives defending Miers' mediocre resume who are playing the Democrats' game. Contrary to recent practice, the job of being a Supreme Court justice is not to be a philosopher-king. Only someone who buys into the liberals' view of Supreme Court justices as philosopher-kings could hold legal training irrelevant to a job on the Supreme Court.

FWIW, Washington State University (home of the Longnecks...um, Cougars) is my alma mater, so no Miersian can hang the "elitist" slam around my fleshy neck.

As a bonus, Ms. Coulter makes the best argument I've seen as to why the combination of staunch constitutionalism and elite university education is vitally important:

Conservatives from elite schools have already been subjected to liberal blandishments and haven't blinked. These are right-wingers who have fought off the best and the brightest the blue states have to offer. The New York Times isn't going to mau-mau them – as it does intellectual lightweights like Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee – by dangling fawning profiles before them. They aren't waiting for a pat on the head from Nina Totenberg or Linda Greenhouse. To paraphrase Archie Bunker, when you find a conservative from an elite law school, you've really got something. [emphasis added]

Let's put it this way: if judicial liberalism were a communicable disease (as opposed to just an arguable mental disorder....), who would you send into a quarantine zone - a virologist/MD who has dealt with this malady before and has been innoculated against it, or an LPN whose speciality has been emptying bedpans and has no immune system?

Admit it, Miersians - Bush blew this pick. Big time. And with it any claim to our faith and trust for the foreseeable future.

And one doesn't need an "elite" education to recognize it; just open eyes.