Published Oct 3, 2005
Um, yeah. I have a confession to make. I’m a lifelong, vote-the-party-line Democrat. I think the Republican party is an evil, reactionary, racist, corrupt party. But I don’t think that Bush’s nominee for the Supreme Court is all that bad.
I mean, sure, she’s a conservative evangelical. But what do people expect? We lost the election. Let’s not bitch just because we got what was coming to us for putting up a pair of mediocre candidates. No, we need to compare the Supreme Court candidate to the universe of candidates we could have gotten from a Bush administration; and, from that group, she’s pretty good.
She’s good for the reason everyone’s been criticizing her — she’s not an appellate justice. Supreme Court Justices have to hear a lot of cases, on a lot of topics that were unexpected when they were appointed; to make the right decision for society, a justice needs to understand society. Miers has been part of society, as a lawyer and as a State Bar leader. She’s seen a lot more of what’s out there than the typical individual who sits on the bench — although judges see a lot of cases crossing their dockets, they don’t participate in what happens leading up to those appeals and so lack a certain kind of perspective. Other Supreme Court Justices with similar backgrounds have done great jobs, and there’s no particular reason to think Meier is too stupid to do one herself.
Of course it’s reasonable for Congresspeople to expect Miers to speak about her judicial philosophy — and reasonable that, as an attorney, she should have one. Lacking a record we need some idea of where she stands, to understand if she’s relatively representative of the mainstream, or if she’s representative of some inappropriate set of fringe ideas, given that the role of the judiciary is to be small-c conservative. I’d expect her to be more forthcoming than Roberts was in his hearings. We do deserve a thoughtful, interesting, grounded judge, who help move our society forwards in a positive way. And that depends more on the judge’s ability to make appropriate decisions, based on precedent, procedure, and society, all of which go beyond simple liberal and conservative.
So, yeah, I like Miers’s appointment. Sure, it’s exemplary of a lot of negative behaviors we’ve seen from the Bush 2 White House, but, taken as herself, she’s not that bad. Let’s all just relax.
I disagree. I could live with Roberts, but Miers is a hack. I’m certain she’ll dodge questions just as much as Roberts did, if not more-so; she has no meaningful paper-trail, but given that she’s such a brown-noser that she once declared President Bush to be the smartest man she knows, she’s almost certainly a reactionary like Bush himself, with little respect for anything but what she thinks the law OUGHT to be.
She is, prospectively, worse than Thomas.
PS: I think Matt Yglesias has summed up the case against Miers fairly well; it largely amounts to “The Texas Lottery Commissioner on the Supreme Court?”
PPS: Not to pile things on, but Mickey Kaus — not your standard left-wing type — is also taking shots at her, arguing that she essentially can’t credibly claim impartiality any time in the near future. (And he picked up the idea from the WSJ…)
Bad enough we have Scalia going hunting with Cheney; do we need to have Bush’s personal yes-woman on the court?
Hmm, I don’t mean to pile it on, but this seems to be mostly sound and fury, signifying nothing. I mean, I’m all about upholing Roe v. Wade, finding another court brave enough to make a decision like Brown, but all the criticisms of Meier seem to be “well, she might be X, because we can’t prove she’s otherwise.”
I don’t mean to minimize the fact that we have a complete unknown, and that she has the obligation to not be an unknown, but we can’t simply tar her with whatever brush we please, in the absence of information.
And the digs on O’Connor? We should be lucky to get a judge so favorable to our point of view, and she wasn’t exactly inconsistent in her rulings.
So, I’m unconvinced. Let’s just chill out and see what she has to say. She could be just fine. And she’s certainly the right kind of person to have on the court.
(Now, you’re right, her appointment is exemplary of the cronyism of the Bush administration, and, while this is particularly disturbing because of his preference to surround himself with the incompetent, the fact is that we’re stuck with someone Bush would nominate, and I believe Meiers is good relative to that metric.)
George Will nailed it: http://tinyurl.com/76mpz
I agree with much of what Will says there. Still, I’m falling back on my carefully-chosen language above (as the former WG said, “you shoulda gone to law school!”). I didn’t say she was great. I said she was not that bad, when compared with the universe of people Bush could have nominated.
Sure she’s a crony. Sure she’s done nothing of note. But, if you look at the people Bush has surrounded himself with, well, that’s pretty much what he can get. Brownie? Check. Cheney? Check. You know the old saying, As hire As, Bs hire Cs, and here we have a C hiring Ds.
So what do you expect? Bush is intellectually incapable of nominating a Marshall or a Scalia. Of the universe of possible Bush appointees, Meiers is among the less likely to be a Thomas. And I’d rather not have a Thomas.
So, yes, Will’s right, she’s totally unqualified. But, I think, if we get away with this one, we’re not doing badly.
So defensive! :) I wasn’t saying you were wrong, jsut that I liked Will’s take. You’re definitely right about C’s hiring D’s. “The smartest man” she knows”? Gives me a whole new perspective on Texans.
The thing is, Wade, we’ve already had a counterexample to your argument. Bush nominated Roberts. I, frankly, was ticked off at the Democratic interest groups for getting into as much of a tizzy over him as they did; there was one issue that bothered me — the fact that he denied having been a member of the Federalist Society, when it later turned out he had been chair of one of their chapters. (It may’ve been an honorary post and a bit of resume padding, so maybe he honestly forgot about it, but that’s kinda weird. And it’s not like it would’ve disqualified him, so why wasn’t he just forthright about it?) Other than that, I really had no complaints — he rejected Lochnerism, and as for Roe v Wade, honestly, I think it’s over-rated. (A Republican court overturning Roe would usher in a decade or more of Democratic control of the legislature and presidency.)
So, we already had Roberts — why should we now settle for Miers?
I see your point, Roberts is remarkably competent, compared to the universe of possible Bush appointees.
I guess it depends on how high your opinion of Bush is. I simply don’t have enough faith in him to attribute Roberts’s nomination to anything besides blind luck. You think that he, and his cabinet, possess the ability to repeatably nominate someone of that caliber. So long as you continue to hold a higher opinion of the Bush administration than I, I think we will be unable to resolve this disagreement.
You could see it as the administration having made a grievous political error — had they nominated Miers first, they would’ve had an easier time getting her by. They’ve set the bar too high by putting up Roberts first; now people can say, “Give us another Roberts.”