Tag Archives: links

More On Miers

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I have no respect for any Democratic senator who finds Harriet Miers’s nomination to the Supreme Court acceptable, such as Charles Schumer, Harry Reid and others. I understand why most Republican senators would support her – despite her utter lack of qualifications, she passes their religion/abortion tests. But how can a Democratic senator support her when she lacks any evidence of the intellectual firepower necessary to sit on the Court, and probably doesn’t agree with them on substantive issues to boot? I’m flummoxed, unless they’re pretending to like her in order not to give Republicans more reasons to support her.

I loathe this nominee. It’s odd that I find myself agreeing with people like George Will and Charles Krauthammer (BTW, doesn’t he totally look like Mandy Patinkin?), but I do.

Of course, I feel some schadenfreude watching many conservatives get as angry about this nomination as I am. But that doesn’t mean I don’t agree with them, even if my reasons are slightly different than theirs:

For more than two decades, conservatives have been developing a team of potential justices for the high court in preparation for a moment such as this. They point to jurists such as Judge J. Michael Luttig of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, Judge Michael W. McConnell of the 10th Circuit and Judge Priscilla R. Owen, newly sworn in on the 5th Circuit, as examples of people who have not just paid their dues but also weathered intellectual battles in preparation for reshaping the Supreme Court….

“The feeling was after John Roberts that surely the president was going to have to go to the bench where there were all these very excellent people who are serving on the circuit court or scholars who have been grooming for this possibility for years and years,” said Paul M. Weyrich, a leading voice in the conservative movement and one who has been openly skeptical of Miers.

Luttig and McConnell are highly qualified for the Court and I could respect them. But Owen? She might be intellectually qualified (is she? I don’t know), but she’s a major radical and I find her decisions odious. It’s Miers’s lack of intellectual qualifications and experience that concern me more than her purported judicial “philosophy” (if she even has one). Although that does bother me, too.

That said, she could pull a John Kerry during her confirmation hearings. Many people were surprised by John Kerry’s first presidential debate performance because they had built up all these preconceived notions about him in a portrait painted by the Republicans. It’s possible that Miers is a lot smarter than I’m giving her credit for.

But there’s no reason to believe that’s true unless there’s any evidence for it.

Harriet Miers was an awful, awful choice for a nomination. She’s completely unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court and her name should be withdrawn.

Hamilton on Miers

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Regarding Harriet Miers, I like this op-ed.

From The Federalist No. 76, about the Senate’s role in voting on a Supreme Court nominee:

“To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity. . . . He would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure.”

(Italics are by the author of the above link.)

Harriet Miers, anyone?

Blawgs/Seminole

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My finger seems to be normal again. That’s good.

Unfortunately, my throat has been sorer today than yesterday. I decided to take the day off from work. After Matt and I had lunch at Lemongrass, I went to the hardware store and bought new air-conditioner filters. Hopefully that’ll make things better.

I also went through my several boxes of memorabilia today (from childhood, adolescence, high school and college) and separated out about half the stuff to toss in the trash. God, I’ve been such a packrat. I don’t know why I was keeping my high school U.S. History notes or my DC Heroes role-playing game.

In other news, I’ve been thinking about starting a law blog (or “blawg”). Lately I’ve been writing lots of law-type stuff, and I’m not sure how interesting it is to my readers. On the other hand, I don’t know if I’d want to write about legal stuff enough to justify a daily law blog.

But this afternoon (and this will sound random) I finished reading Justice Souter’s dissent in Seminole Tribe v. Florida, a major Eleventh Amendment case from 1996. I studied the case in law school and saw a reference to it again recently, so I decided to print out Souter’s dissent and reread it. It’s a brilliant piece of scholarship, and it’s nearly three times as long as Rehnquist’s misguided majority opinion. Over the past 100+ years, the Supreme Court has fucked up the Eleventh Amendment beyond belief.

Anyway, I like having just one blog. Even if it doesn’t have a consistent focus, and some readers might be thrown off by some of the topics, this blog’s a reflection of me and of what’s going through my brain at any given time. And again, I don’t think I’m obsessive enough to keep up a daily blawg.

So I might as well just keep the one.