Miers Round-up
Written by Mike on October 4th, 2005The 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.
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Cherry-picking the news, are we Mike?
“MIERS ON EXTREME END OF PRO-LIFE MOVEMENT”
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/12809508.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp
“MIERS SUPPORTED ANTI-SODOMY LAW”
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-miers-gay-rights,0,3457853.story?coll=sns-ap-nation-headlines
I’m disappointed in you guys, I really am. You were in a rush to declare victory against the left, as are most of us. But you then rushed to judgment against Bush when he failed to provide you with that instant gratification. Miers will be a superb conservative justice, she will.
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Joe, Bush Sr told us the exact same thing about Souter. Now that Brownback is out as skeptical and George Will is angry the conservative revolt seems in process.
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Mark, do you have ANYTHING to contradict this evidence that she is a strict-constructionist, opposes Roe v. Wade, and opposes the radical homosexual agenda?
Do you have ANYTHING?
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“Miers will be a superb conservative justice, she will.”
Really. And you know this how?
David Souter, John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Conner; all of them were appointed by Republican presidents. That is 4/6 appointments (not including Roberts since we know next to nothing about him) that turned out to be liberals once they got to the court. That is a horrible %. Basically the GOP has been telling us since Ford to “trust them”.
No. I am not going to just “trust Bush”. If that bothers you and the rest of the GOP establishment, tough.
As for cherry picking the news, I picked what was relevant. I don’t care if she is hardcore pro-life. That is nice, but so the fuck what? Her understanding, her fundamental knowledge of the proper role of the Constitution is what matters. And the aggregate information available right now indicates . . . nothing. With all of the numerous other picks Bush could have made (many of whom are far more qualified than she is) why did he pick someone that no one knows anything about. How can the Senate determine if she is qualified?
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“Do you have ANYTHING?”
We don’t have to have shit. We didn’t make the damn nomination. The administrations job is to prove that they aren’t repeating history like every single GOP administration since Ford.
Let me explain it this way. There was not a single reason to NOT nominate Janice Rogers Brown.
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Joe,
This is the same SaveTheGOP bunch that jumped at the opportunity to call Bush a failure after he nominated Roberts. Let’s not waste our time arguing here.
Rehnquist had never been a judge before he was nominated to Chief Justice, but that doesn’t matter to Michael Shutze, Mark Harris and crew.
They’re on a power trip, as are others. Stay focused on the senators who will vote on this nomination.
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Thank you for proving my point.
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“Rehnquist had never been a judge before he was nominated to Chief Justice, but that doesn’t matter to Michael Shutze, Mark Harris and crew.
They’re on a power trip, as are others.”
YES! It didn’t take them long to resort to attacking our motives. Because of course we don’t really believe what we are saying, we are just getting a kick out of attacking the party elites that we really deep down want to be right?
Fuck you, you anonymous coward. I don’t care that she hasn’t been a judge. I never in fact wrote anything like that. I LIKE that she hasn’t been a judge in some ways. I don’t like that she has no record of constitutional understanding. I don’t like that, once again, a Republican president is asking us to trust his best judgement since history has taught us that sleepers are more likely to be liberals than conservatives. In fact all sleepers have turned out to be liberals. Both Scalia and Thomas were known commodities. It would seem then that if a justice is going to be a true conservative then they usually demonstrate it long before the GOP notices them.
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I think folks need to understand that the burden of evidence here is not on conservatives to prove that Miers isn’t an originalist, but on the Bush administration to prove that she is an originalist. No one is saying she needs to be a fire breather in the line of Scalia/Brown, but we all agree that she needs to be someone who fulfills the Bush campaign promise to nominate originalists.
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On top of what has already been said on this thread, I will add that it is SAD that some of the bloggers on this site now feel that it is expedient to endorse attacks on George W. Bush’s intelligence.
Specifically Mark Harris’s post quotes some guy where he says “Bush may have many virtues, but being the sharpest knife in the drawer isn;t one of them.”
To recap what has happened over the past few days:
1) SaveTheGOP’s crowd claims Bush’s new nominee, Harriet Miers, is more or less pro-Roe and pro-gay marriage.
2) They are decisively refuted 110% on both issues. Miers is almost certainly the #4 vote against Roe on the Court, and supported laws prohibiting sodomy. Connect the dots.
3) Having been confronted with material evidence that they were wrong about Miers, they instead go on a rant about George Will etc and how there’s a “conservative revolt,” again ignoring the fact that there is no reason to revolt against any Rehnquist-style nominee.
Revolting against a nominee who opposes Roe v. Wade and opposes the radical homosexual agenda, who has a sound strict-constructionist reading of the US Constitution :: this makes you worse than disloyal to Bush — it makes you disloyal to the conservative cause.
And it makes no rational sense. Either you haven’t been paying attention to the news — news which demonstrates Miers is conservative, or you place your “instant gratification against the left” above your loyalty to the conservative cause.
Not pretty at all.
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“who has a sound strict-constructionist reading of the US Constitution”
You don’t know that. There is no possible way you could know that, since no one except Bush and his inner circle really know what Miers thinks. They are asking us to trust them, and I don’t. You are asking us to accept another GOP sleeper pick. I won’t. Every single sleeper pick, ever, has been a liberal. Earl Warren, Jon Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Sandra Day O’Conner. We have been told endlessly to just trust the GOP, why should we with a record like that?
The fact that none of this concerns you tell me that your loyalty is to the party and the man who leads it, not the cause.
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Those selections of Warren, O’Connor, etc. were not sleeper picks.
Souter’s positions on everything from Church and State to Roe v. Wade were paramountly clear, all of his decisions were Conservative with a capital C. All you need to do is look at his opinions on the New Hampshire Supreme Court.
Warren was known to be a strong law and order politician, given his role in putting Japenese into internment camps during WWII.
Kennedy was a fallback pick, as the Senate had just thrashed Reagan over Bork’s nomination.
O’Connor was a campaign promise from Reagan that he would appoint a woman. In addition Reagan had a great personal admiration for O’Connor, as well as there were few women to chose from in 1982.
Stevens was never pitched as a Conservative, and has consistently had a liberal track record.
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With that said, I don’t believe that Miers has the intelectual fire power to sit on the Court. She most likely will saddle up with Scalia/Thomas for a few years, but there is the strong possibility that she might begin to side with more liberals, as it’s clear that she doesn’t have record of strong convictions.
A good recommendation would be for one of the possible GOP presidential candidates to come out against Miers, which will probably not derail her confirmation. Such a derailment would garner the rath of the White House and the Bush-Cheney organization. Instead it will be a clear way to differentiate a Brownback from the rest of the crowd, which will be his only shot of distinguishing himself.
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“I don’t believe that Miers has the intelectual fire power to sit on the Court.”
From what I have seen thus far I don’t think she would be a bad Justice from an intellectual standpoint. I am not sure that her ideas are the right ones though.
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You’re called “SAVE the GOP”???
How ironic.
What will you be up to next, calling for Bush’s impeachment with the DU and Kos?
Maybe you should change your site name to “Save the GOP - Vote Hillary.” Or maybe you should just WAIT FOR THE CONFIRMATION HEARINGS…although I suspect that won’t make any difference to you.
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The problems here are pretty easy to name:
You were AGAINST Miers from the minute Drudge first put up her picture on his webpage.
You have IGNORED evidence Miers is a right-wing bombthrower, so that you can feel sorry for yourselves just like Joseph Farah and the rest of the do-nothing squad.
There may well be legitimate reasons to be concerned about Miers (who I suspect is another Rehnquist), but none of this site’s authors have CARED.
What’s the matter? Did you personally pick a fight with liberals and expect Bush to help you ‘win’ that fight? Were you OUTRAGED when these liberals thought they had gained the upper hand? Did you stop caring about whether Miers was a conservative, based only upon whether it gave you an upper hand in this squabble?
You HAVE betrayed the conservative cause, because you care more about settling your personal squabbles against liberals than you do about getting Roe v. Wade overturned.
Bush saying “Trust Me” IS good enough for me. Even if Miers turns out to be a stellar conservative, it won’t be good enough for you.
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Beth, I am sorry you don’t understand where we are coming from. I don’t think you perceive politics at the same level that we do. I hate Daily Kos, DU and Hillary. You don’t seem to be able to differentiate between traitors and conservatives that don’t trust Bush or the GOP. The confirmation hearings will tell us nothing, I was hoping for a clear record of constitutional knowledge, instead I get someone who thought Al Gore would have been a good president in 1988 and Bill Clinton would have been a good president in 1992. That doesn’t bother you? This woman became a “conservative” in 1979 after she found God. But nearly a decade later she was still giving money to the DNC. I think she is a typical Rockefeller big government Republican and that is simply not acceptable.
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Looking at this and all the other Miers posts and comment threads long after that whole saga ended, I just think a little “we told you so” against the GOP loyalists is in order.
Heaven forbid Save The GOP refuse to go along with President Bush and the RNC establishment against a SCOTUS pick! Trust the president, he knows what he’s doing, who cares if nobody can really tell what her judicial philosophy is?!?
Oh, wait, what happened next? That’s right, enough conservatives revolted, the White House pulled the nomination, and we got a superb nominee and now Justice Alito, who was a known judicial conservative comparable to Justice Scalia (prompting the nickname “Scalito” for Alito during the confirmation process).
Sorry, Joe and the GOP establishment, sometimes revolting is the right thing to do. Had conservatives listened to people like you arguing that revolting was equal to being a “traitor” against the President, the GOP, and even the conservative cause (ha!), who knows how Justice Miers might be acting on the court now?
Sometimes it’s nice to look back on a victory and say, “told you so.”