Man, what is it with some of you conservatives? Do you really think that Bush would be dumb enough to put someone on the bench of the Supreme Court if he did not know her views? This is what I was bitching about last week, conservatives ready to jump ship when Bush does something they see as being less conservative then they like. Give it a rest will ya and be patient. I think as more time goes on we will find out that Harriet Miers will be a great conservative justice.
Hugh Hewitt puts it mildly:
James Dobson endorsed Harriet Miers today. Jay Sekulow endorsed Harriet Miers today. Add their endorsements to those of the president, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and numerous other Administration officials. Yes, I wanted Judge Luttig or Judge McConnell, but the president wanted Miers, and I don’t for a minute believe it is because of friendship, but because of W’s understanding of the importance of the Court.
President Bush has beaten the Dems like bongo drums for five plus years, and yet some conservatives are spooked by the fact that Harry Reid and Charles Schumer haven’t taken to the Senate floor to announce a attempt at a filibuster. Shouldn’t the presumption be –given the record of the past few election cycles– that the president knows what he is doing?
The hearings will be very, very interesting, and Democrats have put themselves in a very small box. It will be unfortunate if conservative loyalists help them out of it by legitimizing attacks on a dedicated and very qualified public servant.
My suspicion is that as Democrats review Miers personal story, and especially her obvious and deep personal faith, that “the groups” on the left will realize to their horror that, once again, the president has outflanked them. They may try to marshall their forces and launch an assault on Miers. The trouble with some conservatives declaring the end of the world as we know it is that they are effectively taking themselves out of this battle on the first day.
More from Hewitt:
Harriet Miers isn’t a Justice Souter pick, so don’t be silly. It is a solid, B+ pick. The first President Bush didn’t know David Souter, but trusted Chief of Staff Sunnunu and Senator Rudman. The first President Bush got burned badly because he trusted the enthusiams of others.
The second President Bush knows Harriet Miers, and knows her well. The White House Counsel is an unknown to most SCOTUS observors, but not to the president, who has seen her at work for great lengths of years and in very different situations, including as an advisor in wartime.
…Consider that none of the Justices, not even the new Chief, has seen the battlefield in the GWOT from the perspective or with the depth of knowledge as has the soon to be Justice Miers. The Counsel to the President has seen it all, and knows what the President knows, the Secretaries of State and Defense, the Joint Chiefs and the Attorney General.
I suspect that the President thinks first and foremost about the GWOT each morning, and that this choice for SCOTUS brings to that bench another Article II inclined justice with the sort of experience that no one inside the Court will have.
If there is another opening, we will get the Attorney General, and for the first time in I don’t know how long, there will be a block of Article II enthusiasts within the preserve of Article III. If we get two more, a Justice Luttig or McConnell will rise.
The president is a poker player in a long game. He’s decided to take a sure win with a good sized pot. I trust him. So should his supporters.
…UPDATE: Hinderaker calls me “ever-optimistic.” I’m not, and there were some people on the short list that would have trobled me greatly.
Rather, I teach Con Law and served in the White House Counsel’s office as well as other posts in the Executive Branch. This isn’t a Souter nomination, and it has very little Blackmun risk –bringing in a judge from the far reaches of the country only to have them seduced into “growing” in office. Harriet Miers has been in D.C. for every day of the nearly five years of the Bush presidency. Wake up people: Do you really think W is going to elevate a friend who doesn’t agree with him on the crucial issues of the day just because she’s a friend? Bush-haters like Sullivan will smoke that pipe, but no serious analyst of his judicial nominations.
Bush’s picks for the Bench have been stellar, and his support for them unwavering. Conservative critics of Miers are disappointed they didn’t get Luttig or McConnell, but many of them were also disappointed with Roberts. Meanwhile many folks who actually know the nominee are enthusiastic.
The Miers nomination is turning into a Rorschach test dividing conservatives into the camp that understands governing for the long term and those that are so emotionally fragile or contingent in their allegiance that anything they (1)don’t understand or (2) disappoints in any way becomes an occasion for panic and declarations of irreparable injury.
I also note that the hand-wringers act as though a Republican president is an accident, and that there won’t be any more Bush picks, nor any more Republican presidents. Keep up the carping and we might again see the Dems get close to an unbreakable filibuster margin in the Senate.
More from Richard Garnett:
For starters, and with all due respect to Mark Levin, the claim that “[e]ven David Souter had a more compelling resume that Miers” strikes me as quite mistaken. So does the statement that “Miers was chosen for two reasons and two reasons alone: 1. she’s a she; 2. she’s a long-time Bush friend.” There is, at least, a (3), namely, that President Bush and his advisors ? his advisors who are, it should be remembered, entirely committed to constitutionalism in the courts ? believe that Ms. Miers is a judicial conservative.
I yield to no one in my respect for the “farm team” ? McConnell, Alito, Luttig, etc. ? but I am also surprised that some are so quick to assume that this President, who fought hard to get home-run judges Pryor, Owen, Colloton, Brown, McConnell, Sutton, Roberts, etc., confirmed to the courts, would suddenly drop the constitutionalism-ball just to be nice to an old friend or to satisfy those demanding another female justice. This is a White House ? and, more particularly, this is a White House Counsel’s office ? that is well stocked with very smart conservative lawyers, who understand that few things are as important to a President’s sucess, and few tasks are as central to his constitutional obligations, as judicial nominations. Whatever our complaints might be about some of this President’s decisions, I do not think he has ever given conservatives anything to complain about when it comes to judges and Justices.
A.M. Siriano puts it well: (via JunkYard Blog)
The greatest weapon that President Bush has is liberals’ unquestioning belief in his abject stupidity, which has helped him in the effort to undo years of leftist subversion of America, which includes the spread of what we now call “legislating from the bench.” Every other day Bush stands in front of liberals and sends them the same powerful right hook, and every day they look left. So let the beaten decide: Either President Bush is among the shrewdest politicians in history, or it is the liberals who are the stupid ones.
So why was this morning’s nomination of Harriet Miers so brilliant? Because for the second time, Bush chose not a rightist per se, but a Constitutional constructionist (which is to say, a rightist). Since John Roberts was sworn in as Chief Justice, both Democrats and Republicans were out in force, all with the same message: “The next nominee for the Supreme Court will be another Clarence Thomas or Antonin Scalia.”
…What our extremely intelligent President is doing is trying to recreate a Supreme Court that, in the context of its role, has no interest in politics, but only in judging. It’s a novel idea that some other smart guys?far superior in intelligence than any of our modern politicians?conjured up over 200 years ago. The truth is, both Scalia and Thomas are not that much further right than Roberts or Miers (though some would not agree), and I’m not sure it’s all that important, anyway. What is important is that they all share a common goal, which is to judge and not legislate.
The Miers nomination, of course, is not in the bag, but the liberals are going to have some trouble killing this one. They had better fight like the froufy little dogs they are, because if she gets in, their own bag of tricks is nearly empty. Without “legislating from the bench,” they have little power left to effect policy.
Relax people. I don’t agree with everything Bush does but he has played the left like a fiddle the last 5 years and I do believe he has done it again.
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