Category: Old Dish

A RELIGIOUS TEST?

If we are to construe that part of the rationale for the Miers nomination is her religious faith, then the nomination does indeed appear to be unconstitutional. An added irony is that the woman she would replace would be among the most opposed to such a test, as an alert reader has pointed out. In her concurring opinion in Wallace v. Jaffree, 1985, Sandra Day O’Connor wrote

“In my view, the Religion Clauses – the Free Exercise Clause, the Establishment Clause, the Religious Test Clause, Art. VI, cl. 3, and the Equal Protection Clause as applied to religion – all speak with one voice on this point: absent the most unusual circumstances, one’s religion ought not affect one’s legal rights or duties or benefits. As I have previously noted, “the Establishment Clause is infringed when the government makes adherence to religion relevant to a person’s standing in the political community.’ Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38, 69 (1985) (O’CONNOR, J., concurring in judgment).”

My emphasis. Didn’t the president just make “adherence to religion relevant to a person’s standing in the political community”? Does this president have even a rudimentary respect for the separation of church and state?

EMAIL FROM THE BASE

I wonder how prevalent this feeling is out there in the heart of RedStateland:

I think the odds that she will overturn Roe or Affirmative Action are zero-to-way-the-fuck-less-than-zero. And I stand by my prediction that this will be near-catastrophic for the Republican Party. As you have pointed out they have lost the fiscal high ground. They have governed ineffectively. Democrats, OTOH, balanced the budget and cut welfare. They are looking pretty good right about now, aren’t they?
I grew up with, was marinated in, and for some reason continue to live deeply among, the ‘Southern conservative base’. I’ve been to the conservative churches, parties, PTA meetings, gatherings, etc. They will ABSOLUTELY sit on their hands in ’06 and ’08. I think that aspect of this has been way under-explored. If Harry turns out to be a centrist or left-of-center, Republicans are dead meat.
REMEMBER: we only need about 4% of conservatives to sit out, much less vote Democratic, to totally screw up the party. And I think it’ll be more like 20% here in the South. Over the Supreme Court alone.
This is a ticking time bomb, and anyone, including Bush, including Miss Laura, that thinks otherwise, is living in a dream world.

For fiscal conservatives like me, the betrayal has already been about as deep and vast as it could be. For neocons like me, the bungling of Iraq has been, to say the least, distressing. But if you’re a theocon or religious righter who doesn’t really care that much about spending or Iraq but whose fundamental goal is to wrench the country back to a pre-Griswold Eden, the shit has only just hit the fan. So Bush destroys another base of support. Who’s left?

BRASSO! Another tactic in the iPod nano-scratch debate.

BASIC BUDGET FACTS

The Bush explosion of government spending needs more exploration. Heritage has put together a PDF document you can find here with all the relevant facts – from the government’s own records. Some data: Washington now spends a record $22,000 a year per household. Defense and 9/11-related spending accounted for less than half the growth in spending between 2001 and 2003. Overall federal spending is accelerating in Bush’s second term, not declining as he promised. Entitlement spending is set to explode in the next decade or so – requiring massive spending cuts, huge tax hikes, or real entitlement reform. Bush has made the entitlement problem far worse rather than better in his first five years. Under the post-1994 Republican Congress, pork barrel spending has gone from around $10 billion to $25 billion today. The number of “earmarks” under today’s Republicans has gone from 1,439 in 1995 to 13,999 this year so far. The feds cannot account for $24.5 billion spent in 2003. This is what big government conservatism does for you. Happy now?

IRAQ AND VIETNAM

Zawahiri is banking on the analogy to bring victory to the Islamo-fascists. Former secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, has other ideas about how to win long-term in the region. I’m with Laird. He’s also candid about the Bush administration’s horrifying embrace of detainee abuse:

For me, the alleged prison scandals reported to have occurred in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay have been a disturbing reminder of the mistreatment of our own POWs by North Vietnam … The minute we begin to deport prisoners to other nations where they can legally be tortured, when we hold people without charges or trial, when we move prisoners around to avoid the prying inspections of the Red Cross, when prisoners die inexplicably on our watch, we are on a slippery slope toward the inhumanity that we deplore.

Amen.

EMAIL OF THE DAY II

“The email you posted re: Gonzales’s qualification is ridiculous. Whether or not he’s qualified in some absolute sense — a point I don’t wish to engage with — I think it’s hard to say that his record is qualitatively different from Miers’s. Your emailer, of course, tries to dismiss the fact that he had a stronger education and that he was a Texas Supreme Court judge. “Token year,” indeed. But rather than trying to ignore his qualifications, let’s lay them out:

– Attorney General
– Texas Supreme Court judge
– Adjunct law professor
– Secretary of State of Texas
– Rice, Harvard Law graduate

So let’s line those up:
– while Miers was White House Counsel, Gonzales was AG
– while Miers was a staff secretary, Gonzales was White House Counsel
– while Miers was heading up the Texas State lotto, Gonzales was a Texas Supreme Court judge and Texas Secretary of State
– both of them were in private practice roughly comparable times; my understanding is that Vinson & Elkins, Gonzales’s firm, may have been slightly more prestigious, but let’s call this a wash, or in Miers’s favor, since she headed up the firm while Gonzales was merely a partner; both received numerous accolades, etc.; Miers may win out slightly here
– while Miers was at SMU Law, Gonzales was at Harvard Law
– while Miers was at SMU, Gonzales was at Rice

Now, I don’t want to weigh in on the absolute qualifications of either candidate, and I don’t know how much you can say about how good a justice someone will make from his c.v. But Gonzales has judicial experience, high-level policy-making experience (for what it’s worth), and experience dealing with the very best legal minds (whether when collaborating with other Texas Supreme Court judges, when heading up the Justice Departmnet, or when studying under Harvard Law professors).

I think it does an extreme disservice to the concept of (paper) merit to equate these two records. Maybe your emailer thinks Gonzales has been a slouch in his jobs, while Miers has been an ace. But he suggests that we should look only at their paper experience, and that from that they are roughly equivalent. That argument is flat out wrong.”

HER RELIGION?

The desperation of the White House is intensifying. It seems to me that the personal religious faith of a nominee to the Supreme Court is completely irrelevant to the job in question. Interpreting a secular constitution requires no religious faith or affiliation. If the president really does believe that faith is an actual qualification for the court, then once again he has stepped over a line between church and state. Religion should neither qualify nor disqualify someone from SCOTUS. Isn’t that a no-brainer? Is there an evangelical take on the fourteenth amendment? It’s also just plain amusing to hear that, according to the White House, a) no men were considered for the post and that b) opposition to Miers is possibly a function of sexism. Did we elect Hillary Clinton last November?