<$BlogRSDUrl$>
Read. Think. Contribute

Bush Names Stealth Nominee Harriet Miers to Replace O'Connor

Monday, October 03, 2005


I had wanted to do a spoof of a movie ad on Bush's newest stealth nominee to the Supreme Court, but with the Democrats having become a gaggle of spineless, neutured Republiclones and the fawning toadyism and outright bullshit coming from actual Republicans. I am at a loss for good one liners like, Harriet Miers is "An extremely bad choice." says Jonathan Turley, ABC Legal contributor and Law Professor at George Washington University. In fact the only people truly outraged seem to be the right wing wackos who are upset that Miers doesn't seem ready to take a flamethrower to the Roe vs. Wade files.

It's really hard to distinguish one level of slavering, raving, foaming-at-the-mouth idiocy from the other when dealing with people on the far right, but they seem rather upset by this choice from the Bush administration. Here are just a couple of examples:

``The president's nomination of Miers is a betrayal of the conservative, pro-family voters whose support put Bush in the White House in both the 2000 and 2004 elections and who were promised Supreme Court appointments in the mold of Thomas and Scalia. ... When there are so many proven judges in the mix, it is unacceptable this president has appointed a political crony with no conservative credentials.''

- Eugene Delgaudio, president of the conservative group Public Advocate.

"To merely describe Miers as a terrible pick is to underestimate her sheer awfulness as a selection."

- RightWingNews.com

Maybe this means that political discourse has come back to a level more conducive to doing the nation's business or maybe it's just that Bush, not needing any more controversy in this disaster he calls a second term, has wised up and dialed back the "I'm the Pres-o-dent and you're not so shut up and do what I say," garbage that has made so many of us hate him. With approval ratings at a historic low, (at least Bush can point to one contribution he made to history), it seems to have sunk in that not only is his mandate gone but that it never existed in the first place.

I would love nothing more than to be able to blast this nominee simply for the sake of blasting, but don't think for a minute that I'm going to be leading the cheering section on this. I personally think conservative thought is an oxymoron that ignores facts while propping up the fantasy of the self-made man, but that's another story. Just because the wacko's are crying that they didn't get the religious fanatic they deserve for all their hard work in 2004 doesn't mean that Miers will not decide to cut into the protections of Roe vs. Wade. According to some, Miers pushed for the ABA to adopt a permanent position on Roe vs. Wade. Although I can't find a definite source for that statement, I doubt that, if true, she wanted the ABA to stand behind the decision.

The simple fact is that Miers is another Bush crony with even less experience as a judge than John Roberts. I don't even care about the fact that she has no record of decisions to use as a barometer for what she might do in the future. My real concern is that she has had no record of judicial decision making whatsoever. Her entire career has been as one of the many beneficiaries of the Bush largesse. Miers was the one who, according to the Washington Post, found information that Alberto Gonzalez used to keep the Goverenor Bush out of jury duty, which would have forced him to reveal his prior arrest for drunk driving in Maine, which most people still are unaware of. In 1992, Miers was a member of the Dallas City Council. She didn't run for reelection when her seat was downsized from a city-wide district to a single district, apparently not big enough for her. Later, Bush appointed her as head of the Texas Lottery Commission, before bringing her with him to the White House to be his staff secretary, then deputy chief of staff, and finally White House Counsel following Gonzalez' departed to become Attorney General.

Putting someone who has never adjudicated so much as a traffic ticket on the Supreme Court is like giving a sixteen year old the keys to a Greyhound bus. Making a mistake becomes that much larger. I know, she's been a lawyer all her life, she knows what she's about. The problem is we don't.