Much has been made of Miers’ 1988 contribution to Al Gore. Does anyone have the exact date of her donation? Because Gore had been very prolife, voting for the Hyde “Human Life Amendment” in 1984. I found this via NRLC:

In 1988, once he began to actively seek the presidency, Gore repeatedly attempted to deny his previous support for various pro-life policies. For example, asked on Meet the Press about his vote in favor of the Siljander Amendment, Gore simply denied that he had cast such a vote. A Gore campaign advisor later told U.S. News & World Report, “Since there’s a record of that vote, we have only one choice. In effect, what we have to do is deny, deny, deny….We’ve muddled the point, and with luck, attention will turn elsewhere…” (March 7, 1988, page 29).

Is it possible Miers thought she was donating to a President who would appoint constitutionalists? Anyway, I hope someone can get to the bottom of this, I’m going crazy with work ‘n stuff.

From the Corner and Mark Krikorian:

A story that broke yesterday ought to sink any talk of a guestworker amnesty. Internal affairs investigators at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (the piece of the old INS that processes green cards and citizenship) told Congress last week that they’ve found 2,500 of cases of misconduct, including bribery, trading green cards for sex, and foreign government influence on immigration processing. New charges are being added at the rate of 50 a week. And, as a source said of one of the congressional briefings, “The thing that took most of the oxygen out of the room was the realization that there is the distinct possibility that people who have terrorist backgrounds have been able to obtain green cards because of a lack of ability to check their backgrounds.” This is the agency that’s going to screen 11 million illegal aliens so they can stay here legally? See Monday’s story here and today’s follow-up here.

After five years this ain’t what I had in mind. Am I being a bad Republican if I am angry that potential terrorists have snuck across our border with Mexico?

The New York Times is claiming that she became a Republican in 1979 when she became a born again Christian. That doesn’t explain why she gave money to Al Gore nearly a decade afterwards in 1988.

Via Confirm Them: George Will doesn’t think it is important that Miers be confirmed, though he thinks that it might be important that she not be.

Senator Brownback (R-Kansas) has echoed everything we have written here at Save the GOP (proving that even the GOP heavy hitters are nervous) with this statement:

Senator Sam Brownback says he and other conservatives have “a great deal of skepticism” about Harriet Miers, President Bush’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court.

The Kansas Republican is disappointed Bush did not pick a candidate with more of a track record. He had urged Bush to nominate someone who opposes the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Brownback compared the nomination of Miers — Bush’s White House counsel — to that of Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Souter was nominated to the high court by the first President Bush and was believed to be a conservative, but he later turned out to be liberal on the bench.

Brownback is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He will meet with Miers in his Senate office on Thursday.

This from The New Republic is also distressing:

For instance economic conservatives pleased by her corporate law background may find it distressing that in 1990 Miers voted for a 7 percent property tax increase during her short tenure on the Dallas City Council.

Please, someone tell me this a joke. She voted increased property taxes 7%! Again, this is after the supposed 1979 “conversion”.

This final bit, from the American Bar Assoc. is the most troublesome to me:

International Criminal Court

Recommends the development and establishment of an International Criminal Court.

In my mind this qualifies her for immediate impeachment if she ever becomes a justice.

I think that Professor Bainbridge’s rebuttal to Hewitt and cross-applied Ruffini is just fantastic so here it is:

Hewitt’s Still Wrong

Hugh Hewitt continues to defend the Harriet Miers nomination, now by attacking his usual allies on the right. He lays into Rammesh Ponnuru for not bowing down before “scholar” Doug Kmiec’s defense of Miers (Hugh’s choice to emphasize Kmiec’s scholarly credentials is a bit odd, given that in the same post he defends Miers for lacking precisely that qualification.)

The central point of scholar Kmeic’s piece:

[Roberts and Miers] are both steadfast adherents to a judicial ethic of no personally imposed points of view. The cognoscenti snicker when the president reaffirms his criterion of judges who will shun legislating from the bench, since to legal realists, it is inconceivable and to political ideologues it is a missed opportunity. They all do, they all will, goes the refrain. To which Roberts repeatedly answered: No, not this umpire. The same answer can be expected from Miers as she makes her bid to join the officiating crew.

… The refusal of Ponnuru to engage Kmeik’s central argument about ther nature of the battle between results-oriented conservatives and the Roberts-Miers approach doesn’t decide the merits of Kmeic’s argument, but it does reveal that some of the critics of Miers aren’t prepared to answer the charge that their criticism is more disappointment that their own preferred nominee was not selected than serious argument that Miers is a Souter of some sort.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The problem is that people like Hewitt and Kmiec want us to take on faith the proposition that Harriet Miers will “shun legislating from the bench.” Yet, neither Hugh nor Kmiec marshall any evidence from Miers’ record to support that proposition. Hugh’s repeated card - and its the only one he has to play, in my view - is to ask us to trust Bush. So for Hugh, here’s why I am unwilling to trust Bush on this one.

1.
We are told Miers was surprised and upset that her White House office was staffed by Federalist Society types who loathed her beloved ABA.
2.
David Frum, who worked with Miers in the White House, says that “In a White House that hero-worshiped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.” I’m sure even Hugh, who may be Bush’s most consistent defender, would be led to wonder just how many men Miers has met. Bush may have many virtues, but being the sharpest knife in the drawer isn;t one of them.
3.
Frum also says: “She is not the person to lead the court in new directions.” Unfortunately, shunning “legislating from the bench,” as Kmiec put it, is precisely the new direction in which this court most needs to be led.
4.
Why is the leader of a party that is supposedly against affirmative action making an appointment that can only be explained as an affirmative action choice?
5.
You don’t take a Saturday Night Special to an artillery duel. The Supreme Court is the big leagues. You don’t bring your B team to the World Series. Miers may well be a smart lawyer. But she went to the #52 ranked law school in the country and then headed up a Dallas law firm that one of my colleagues who practiced in Dallas tells me got big but was not in the first rank. And, as Pejman observed, “Crashing through glass ceilings is impressive. But the Supreme Court demands more than that.” Call me an intellectual snob if you want, but while I don’t insist on Ivy League credentials, I do insist on documented high power thinking.
6.
As the WSJ observed today, Miers lack of defined views on the great legal questions of the day is troubling precisely because: “The lesson of other Republican nominees without such fixed views — Harry Blackmun, Mr. Souter, Anthony Kennedy — is that they always drift to the left once they get on the Court.”
7.
Hugh has also failed to grapple with the Journal’s observation that Miers’ silence on the great issues of the day is troubling precisely because: “The lesson this nomination in particular will send to younger lawyers is to keep your opinions to yourself, don’t join the Federalist Society, and, heaven forbid, never write an op-ed piece.”
8.
Manuel Miranda made a closely related point, which I find quite important: “The nomination of Harriet Miers has not rid us of the repugnant situation that a jurist with a clear and distinguished record will not be nominated for higher service. The nomination did not rid us of the apprehension of stealth nominees.”
9.
Harry Ried and left-leaning blawgs like TalkLeft like her.
10.
Senator John Cornyn, who knows Miers well, has been quoted as saying that “She is obviously not a Scalia or a Thomas.” Isn’t a Scalia or Thomas precisely what Bush promised us? I’m starting to lose track of the number of promises Bush made to his base and has now broken.
11.
She is a long-time Bush crony. After Mike Brown, Julie Myers and Eduardo Aguirre, and ffive of the top 8 FEMA leaders, to mention just a few, I’ve had my fill of Bush cronies in high positions. And, yes, part of the disappointment is that Bush went with a crony when there are so many other vastly superior candidates out there: “she’s going to the Supreme Court while people like Michael Luttig, Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown & Emilio Garza are being left on the sidelines.”

Hugh insults Miers’ conservative critics by saying things like:

* …some of the critics of Miers aren’t prepared to answer the charge that their criticism is more disappointment that their own preferred nominee was not selected than serious argument that Miers is a Souter of some sort.
* Because they did not know her, they assumed she could not be worth supporting. The cronyism of the chattering class seems to have triumphed over any kind of analysis or credit-according the sort of experiences that ordinary Americans value. …
* Taking the ball and going home because the nominee doesn’t know you by your first name is hardly principle at work, and the refusal to see what she brings to the table isn’t argument

It would be nice if Hugh recognized that Miers’ critics are making principled arguments and joined issue with them instead of just mocking them.

Update: Ponnuru responds to Hewitt here.

If you haven’t read this article via Drudge from the American Thinker, then you should. I think he makes some excellent points about how conservatives wanted a fight. But maybe a fight would have done more than merely satisfied our appetites.

On one hand, if Bush had put up a known constitutionalist, it could have been turned into a campaign issue that would have energized voters. But if our RINO brethren had been complicit in his or her downfall, we may very likely have seen a conservative demoralization not known since the days of Souter and new taxes. Perhaps the hypothetical party purge that would ensue would have been good for conservatives in the long run, but judicial conservatism would have been dealt another 20 year blow.

His optimism of a third (or possibly 4th) Supreme Court nominee is perhaps the best justification for the Miers nomination. It is now the autumn of 2005 and Bush has nominated 2 people to SCOTUS. Who knows what chances he will encounter by the autumn of 2008. It is reasonable to assume that the 85 year-old Stevens would have held out until his death to retire if Bush had nominated a known judicial conservative.

This may have disarmed our old pal Stevens, and we can only hope and pray that we will be able to wish him a happy 88th birthday, addressing him as a former Supreme Court Justice.

What Bush has done is not a small deal, Bush has betrayed us. New reports are coming out that are saying that in “An indication of her stance on gay rights comes from this questionnaire from the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas Miers filled out while running for the Dallas City Council in 1989. In it, she supported full civil rights for gays and lesbians and backed AIDS education programs for the city of Dallas.” We cannot roll over and die on this one. Conservatives must draw a line in the sand and let the administration know that this is unacceptable. I don’t care if Dobson, Sekulow or whoever says that we should support this decision. Where is the boldness and backbone of Regan?