Category: Old Dish

The Miers hearings are going to be key. And I’d say there are a couple of possibilities. The first is that she’ll be revealed in some fashion or other as completely unprepared or unqualified for her proposed job. Specter or Leahy or Biden may get a moment when she is revealed as simply too small for the shoes she is trying to fill. But she’s a very smart woman, from all accounts, and she will be trained well. The second and, to my mind, likelier possibility is that she’ll come off as Ross Perot in a Talbots dress. She’ll be direct, folksy, and the Senatorial inquisition will rally the public to her side. A little lady from Texas versus hair-transplanted blowhard from Delaware? No contest. Bush will play the populist card, while playing the evangelical card to the base beyond his base. “See,” he’ll say. “She’s just what I said and all you pointy-headed neocon intellectuals don’t run the country. I do.” It would not be hard for her to exceed expectations at this point; and every comment I have ever heard about her from within the White House is tinged with a mixture of fear and wonder. There is something we don’t yet know about Miers – and it’s what she’s actually like as a person on television. That could well alter the dynamic of everything.

WHAT IT SAYS: Of course, assuming that this tactic works, and I’m just hypothesizing, it says something less about conservatism or Miers or the Senate, than about Bush. In the matter of the Supreme Court, Bush’s fundamental motives are sticking a finger in the eye of his intellectual supporters, and keeping a crony so close to him that his executive running of the war on terror will never be subject to real Congressional oversight. (Miers is insurance for the executive-branch-worshipping Roberts). Kitty Kelley notes how this president has sealed off from the public decades of presidential data that are vitally important to making democracy work. But this president is and always has been as much a dauphin as a president. He’s responsible for a dynasty as much as a democracy. Miers is the dynasty’s constitutional guardian – as well as potentially a minimalist Justice, in line with Roberts. No other candidate could fulfill both roles. Bush, in other words, is treating the Court as a means for personal protection and dynastic noblesse oblige. The question is simply whether the GOP wants to become the vehicle for a crony-ridden aristocracy or something more transparent and meritocratic. I know which GOP I prefer. But those days keep receding further and further into the past.

Here’s a spectacularly relevant quote from the Federalist Papers, where Hamilton argues for the Senate’s important role in vetting presidential appointments to bodies such as the Supreme Court. Someone should cite it at the Miers’ hearings:

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. In addition to this, it would be an efficacious source of stability in the administration.

It will readily be comprehended, that a man who had himself the sole disposition of offices, would be governed much more by his private inclinations and interests, than when he was bound to submit the propriety of his choice to the discussion and determination of a different and independent body, and that body an entire branch of the legislature. The possibility of rejection would be a strong motive to care in proposing. The danger to his own reputation, and, in the case of an elective magistrate, to his political existence, from betraying a spirit of favoritism, or an unbecoming pursuit of popularity, to the observation of a body whose opinion would have great weight in forming that of the public, could not fail to operate as a barrier to the one and to the other. 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.

My italics. There are two reasons to vote against Harriet Miers. Someone who needs a “crash course” on constitutional law should not be selected to be a Supreme Court Justice required to make decisions, if confirmed, in a short period of time. The second reason is simply that this president has abused his power by picking someone who “worships” him, whose fundamental qualification is that she is an indentured servant to him, and whose fundamental loyalty has long been to a political dynasty, rather than a serious, settled judicial philosophy. I’m still waiting for the hearings to give her a fair shot. But in some ways, this nomination tells us little about Miers, and a lot about Bush. From the Federalist papers, no. 76.

More evidence that a flat tax should be the central issue of the conservative movement.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “This newspaper is second to none in its pro-American sentiments; in the early Bush years it devoted much ink to defending the President against the often malevolent and ignorant attacks of a congenitally anti-American European media. But we know a lost cause when we see one: the longer President Bush occupies the White House the more it becomes clear that his big-government domestic policies, his preference for Republican and business cronies over talented administrators, his lack of a clear intellectual compass and his superficial and often wrong-headed grasp of international affairs – all have done more to destroy the legacy of Ronald Reagan, a President who halted then reversed America’s post-Vietnam decline, than any left-liberal Democrat or European America-hater could ever have dreamt of. As one astute American conservative commentator has already observed, President Bush has morphed in the Manchurian Candidate, behaving as if placed among Americans by their enemies to do them damage.” – editorial in the conservative British newspaper, The Business.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Good Show on Bill Maher last night. It was nice hearing conversation from three individuals who I knew had different political beliefs than my own but were able to convey enough pieces of thought that resulted in a consensus.
For myself, as someone who views himself as “eclectic in thought”, you reminded me last night of days gone by when I enjoyed watching William F. Buckley on “Firing Line”. I would listen, agree or disagree, but actually understand someone and their personal position without throwing up. Too often today, the chasm of ideologies has forced those who earn their living from the “political entertainment field” to seek outrageous positions, void of rational thought, just simply to provide more kindling for the cultural war fire. Why do they do that? So they can perpetuate their employment?”

Of course that Harriet Miers’ blog is a parody.

Yes, she’s got one.

EDITORIAL OF THE DAY: “Even though military officers like Capt. Fishback and retired senior generals Colin Powell and John Shalikashvili endorsed the McCain measure, the Bush administration fought it, insisting that it would tie U.S. hands in waging the war on terror. Yet when Americans feel free to treat other human beings, even evil ones, with the kind of cruelty that the whole world saw at Abu Ghraib, their hands deserve to be tied.
We congratulate the Senate majority, including Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, for standing up to the president and siding with the Ian Fishbacks and Colin Powells, not the Alberto Gonzaleses and Donald Rumsfelds. The House of Representatives should lift itself up in protest by its moral backbone, too, and Mr. Bush should stand down from his threatened veto. There is no honor in it.’ – Dallas Morning News, today. (Reg req.) Good for them.

TNR names names.

Bush’s approval numbers keep going down. Independents give him 29 percent approval.

“Mirengoff, note, said that Miers ‘probably should be confirmed’ even though this will definitely hurt Republicans in the upcoming election. So he was hardly saying that GOP success in the election counts more than her actual qualifications for the post — he was simply noting that she WILL hurt the GOP in the election. In short, he was actually saying the opposite of what you accuse him of.”

Not quite. A Miers’ defeat would also deeply weaken the president at a time when he is reeling anyway – and therefore hurt the president’s party in 2006. So Mirengoff’s calculation is that the least worst option is to complain loudly but go along with the Great Leader anyway. The bottom line is: loyalty. Always. Even when you disagree profoundly. Party before principle. Always.

The Catholic bishops of England tell American fundamentalists the bleeding obvious: not everything in the Bible is literally true. Money quote: “We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision.” Of course. Anyone who believes that the world was literally created in six days a few thousand years ago is not expressing his or her “religious beliefs”. Believing something that is demonstrably and empirically untrue is not religion. It is simply superstition or lunacy. It has nothing to do with faith in things we cannot know. The notion that it should actually be taught in public schools as science is beneath even debating.

I recently felt compassion for the lawmakers from Louisiana. Now I feel contempt. The indispensable Veronique de Rugy reveals the scandal of Landrieu’s pork-fest. $25,490,073 to complete the Sugarcane Research Laboratory? Senator Landrieu: I have a few ideas where you can put that sugarcane.