Miers to be SC nominee?

BBB


I'm busted---again.

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BBB
Bush had to anticipate what the reaction of the most radical right wing republicans would be.

If he really cared about Harriet Miers, he would not have set her up for such a humiliating experience.

Another possibility is that he knew what the reaction would be and he's sacrificing Miers to withdraw her nomination in order to open the door to an alternative nominee who would be an ideologue accepted to the rabble. He can claim he tried to nominate a conservative similar to Justice O'Conner, but was blocked.

BBB

Miers Questions
Miers Questions
Robert Schlesinger10.06.2005
Miers Questions

Those of us on the left side of the political spectrum have been enjoying the view as our right-wing counterparts take their turn at Bush-pummeling. The current conservative frothing over Harriet Miers raises a few questions, like:

- I know why we progressives distrust Bush, but what's the conservative beef with him?

Bush critics can forget that this White House's expectations of unquestioning loyalty have also irked its own supporters. And we can also forget that conservatives' patience can only be pushed so far, as Robert Novak notes in his column today. "The conservative Republican base had tolerated George W. Bush's leftward lunges on education spending and prescription drug subsidies to re-elect him so that he could fill the Supreme Court with conservatives and send it rightward," Novak writes. "But the White House counsel hardly looked like what they had expected."

- What does James Dobson know? And when will we find out? Dobson has come out in favor of Miers, saying mysteriously that he knows more about her views than he will let on. "Some of what I know I am not at liberty to talk about," Dobson told The New York Times. Perhaps not. But perhaps either he or someone in the administration will be at liberty to discuss it with the Senate Judiciary Committee. "It seems to me, all of the [information] the White House knows about Harriet Miers should be made available to the Senate and the American people," rookie Senator Ken Salazar, a Colorado Democrat, said. "If they're making information available to Dr. Dobson -- whom I respect and disagree with from time to time -- I believe that information should be shared equally with a U.S. senator." (Thanks to the folks at DailyKos.)

- But the question progressives should be asking is: Who's behind door number two? Suppose the conservatives actually manage to take Miers down? If the Democrats unite in opposition, it wouldn't take very many. Trent Lott has already made clear his discomfort with her, and leading opinion-makers like Novak and George Will have not been kind. So supposing they put their votes where their mouths are? Would Bush get obstinate and nominate another - what? - I won't say moderate, but someone without conservative credentials? Novak again: "Bushologists figure the president was irked by repetitive demands that he satisfy the base with his Supreme Court appointments. He also was irked by the conservative veto of his Texas friend and Miers' predecessor at the White House, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. So, Bush showed the critics by naming another close aide lacking Gonzales' track record to draw the ire of the party's right wing."

Or will Bush follow the fixing-Dad's-mistakes pattern. Recall education, tax cuts, Iraq, disaster response (oops, scratch that one) -- areas where Bush II has tried to fix the perceived sins of Bush I. Under that scenario, Bush would really this time fix the Souter problem by nominating a proud conservative.

While senators should of course vote based on high-minded notions of suitability, Democrats might at least ponder this last question. Because while it may be fun to join with the other side to scuttle a nomination, you have to ask yourself if it's worth the next nominee.

The University of Michigan, Law Kibrary, has collected, btw, all (online)links to information about and writings by Harriet Miers.

Making Sense of the Miers Nomination
I don't agree with Parry that Bush thinks Miers being on the Supreme Court would help him and other White House staff with the Plane prosecution. She would have to recuse herself if any appeal or case came before the court. ---BBB

Making Sense of the Miers Nomination
By Robert Parry
October 7, 2005
Boston Globe

By picking his personal lawyer Harriet Miers to fill a key swing seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, George W. Bush angered his right-wing supporters, who wanted someone with clearer conservative credentials, and opened himself to new charges of cronyism - a double whammy of bad PR. So why did he do it?

The most common theory is that Bush was looking for a stealth candidate who wouldn't provoke strong Democratic opposition but would get solid Republican backing - after some wink-wink assurances that she would vote the right way on abortion and other core conservative issues.

That indeed may be the answer. Bush may have just miscalculated how disappointed his conservative base would be and how offended other Americans would be at his straight-faced assertion that his White House counsel was "the best person I could find."

But there is another theory that would fit the facts. It may be that Bush is less concerned about constitutional issues than he is about criminal and political disputes that might reach the court if the troubles surging around his administration get worse.

What if, for instance, a senior Bush aide is facing prosecution in connection with an untested law prohibiting unmasking covert CIA officers? It might be handy for Bush to have a trusted friend on the court of last resort to rule on some technical legal questions that could torpedo the whole case.

Or what if it turns out that Bush himself participated in the criminal act? Wouldn't it be advantageous if the lawyer who helped him out of previous legal scrapes was sitting among the judges who would make a ruling on this one? (And there really is no reason to think that a Bush appointee would step aside because of some fretting over conflicts of interest.)

The Nixon Tale

Bush also might be concerned about the court ordering him to hand over a document or reveal some sensitive secret that could be politically embarrassing. Who better to see the issue through Bush's eyes than someone who has worked by his side for the past decade?

Republicans haven't forgotten that when Richard Nixon was trying to keep his White House tape recordings out of the hands of Watergate prosecutors in 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against him unanimously. Conservative justices joined with liberals in declaring that no man is above the law.

After Nixon surrendered his tapes, which revealed him plotting the Watergate cover-up, his presidency was finished.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Reagan-Bush administrations learned the value of having dedicated conservative judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington when Republicans were facing another crisis over the Iran-Contra Affair.

After Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh won a hard-fought conviction of White House aide Oliver North, two right-wing judges - Laurence Silberman and David Sentelle - threw the case out on a technicality. Sentelle then joined in a second ruling wiping out the conviction of Ronald Reagan's national security adviser John Poindexter.

The reversals helped protect Reagan and George H.W. Bush by showing that Walsh would be stopped if he tried to use felony convictions of lower-level officials to get them to testify against the higher-ups.

To further box Walsh in, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist installed Sentelle as the chief judge overseeing special prosecutors, an appointment that discouraged Walsh from continuing his investigation of possible obstruction of justice by the first President George Bush.

(A side benefit for conservatives was that Sentelle, a protégé of right-wing Sen. Jesse Helms, was still in place to pick a series of conservative prosecutors to go after President Bill Clinton and officials in his administration.) [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq.]

Walsh, a lifelong Republican who had supported Ronald Reagan, concluded that the Reagan-Bush loyalists on the U.S. Court of Appeals represented "a powerful band of Republican appointees [who] waited like the strategic reserves of an embattled army." [See Walsh's memoir, Firewall.]

Bush v. Gore

Election 2000 also taught George W. Bush how valuable friends on the federal courts can be. In December 2000, as he was trying to stop a state-court-ordered recount in Florida, he was rebuffed by a federal appeals court in Atlanta, where the conservative judges took seriously their philosophical commitment to states' rights.

So, Bush sent his lawyers to the U.S. Supreme Court where five Republican justices - Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas - set aside those principles in favor of a political desire to stop the vote counting and put Bush into the White House. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "Rehnquist's Legacy: A Partisan Court."]

Since taking office in 2001, George W. Bush has reinforced the Republican "strategic reserves" on the federal appeals courts. But until this year, he wasn't able to shore up his political advantage on the U.S. Supreme Court.

After Rehnquist died this summer, Bush picked trusted conservative John Roberts to succeed the chief justice. Now, Bush has chosen White House insider Miers to replace O'Connor, a move that should strengthen Bush's last line of legal defense, given O'Connor's lack of consistency on conservative causes.

The Miers appointment, however, hasn't gone as Bush expected. She has drawn almost as much negative comment from the Right as from the Left.

Former White House speechwriter David Frum took a bemused pride in being out front in mentioning Miers's name as O'Connor's possible successor.

"I believe I was the first to float the name of Harriet Miers, White House counsel, as a possible Supreme Court," Frum wrote in his blog, David Frum's Diary, Sept. 29, 2005. "I have to confess that at the time, I was mostly joking.

"Harriet Miers is a capable lawyer, a hard worker, and a kind and generous person. She would be an [sic] reasonable choice for a generalist attorney, which is indeed how George W. Bush first met her. She would make an excellent trial judge: She is a careful and fair-minded listener. But US Supreme Court?

"In the White House that hero worshipped 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. She served Bush well, but she is not the person to lead the court in new directions - or to stand up under the criticism that a conservative justice must expect."

Some Washington wags joked about who was less in touch with reality, Miers who considered Bush "the most brilliant man she had ever met" or Bush who claimed that Miers was "the best person I could find?"

Clearly Bush, the 59-year-old Texas "bad boy" who needed smart lawyers to keep his past misdeeds secret, and Miers, the 60-year-old unmarried workaholic lawyer specializing in discreet client care, were part of a mutual-admiration society.

Thin Credentials

But some prominent conservatives, such as columnist George F. Will, found the Bush-Miers coziness offensive and her qualifications suspect to anyone well-versed in constitutional law.

"If 100 people such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists," Will wrote in a column entitled "Can This Nomination Be Justified?"

Based on what is presently known, Will called on the Senate not to confirm Miers.

"Otherwise, the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends," Will wrote. [Washington Post, Oct. 5, 2005]

For some conservatives, the Miers nomination represented the cronyism-bridge-too-far, but other Bush watchers saw the Miers pick as part of the president's psychological need for approval from loyal and adoring women, such as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Under Secretary of State Karen Hughes.

"W. loves being surrounded by tough women who steadfastly devote their entire lives to doting on him, like the vestal virgins guarding the sacred fire, serving as custodians for his values and watchdogs for his reputation," wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

"In 1998, during his re-election race for governor, Harry [Miers's nickname] handled the first questions about whether Mr. Bush had received favorable treatment to get into the Texas Air National Guard to avoid the draft," Dowd wrote.

"But who cares whether she has the judicial experience, and that no one knows what she believes or how she would rule from a bench she's never been behind, as long as the reason her views are so mysterious is that she's subordinated them to W.'s, making him feel like the most thoughtful, far-sighted he-man in the world?" [NYT, Oct. 5, 2005]

The Miers nomination appears heading toward a harder-than-expected fight. But if Bush and his political tough guys - the likes of Karl Rove and Tom DeLay - do end up facing serious criminal troubles, they might thank their lucky stars if one of Bush's "vestal virgins" is protecting their legal flanks from a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.

Yes, I am beginning to wonder about this too.

Supreme Court candidates don't go down without a bruising fight, and Bush might have decided to put Miers up to take their best shots, then give them a rock-ribbed conservative. With all the hoopla about putting Miers down, it would be hard to organize opposition to the next nominee, whoever that might be.

The flaw in the plan might be that if Miers goes down, combined with everything else that is happening, Bush might not have much political capital left to put anyone over.

With a full-strength president, mounting two successful battles against his Supreme Court nominees is very hard, if not impossible to do. These things tend to take a lot out of both sides.

Against a weakened president of falling popularity, the task is far easier. If Meirs goes down, I would think Bush would be forced to choose a centrist with a stellar judicial record. He wouldn't have the political juice to put in an ideologue.

Re: Making Sense of the Miers Nomination

This gives me a smidgeon of hope: I have been worried that she will be confirmed, but also worried that she will not be confirmed, which I have thought would set up potential confirmation of a justice whose presence on the court might depress me even more.

I just read in the 'Washington Times' (national weekly edition, October 10 - 16; page 1 and 22), that born-again experience has rearranged Mier's worldview.
So, it's of course very inportant to mention in that article that Miers joins - when in Washington - the ") am service across the street from the White House at St. John's Episcopal Church, which Mr. Bush attends frequently as well".


I doubt that mayn journalists here even know the confession of one of Federal court judges (that's the highest court[s] in Germany.

Re: Making Sense of the Miers Nomination

I can't believe it -- I agree with Debra and BBB. I expect water to flow uphill any second now.

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Miers, Herself
Opinion: The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Miers, Herself
By Chris Floyd
Bush Watch
10/11/05

Miers, who has zero experience as a judge, is cut from the same cloth [as Roberts]. Bush first hired her to dig into his own past and bury the skeletons she found there as he limbered up for his presidential run in the 1990s, The Associated Press reports. Miers delivered the goods, brokering a convoluted $23 million payoff to former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes and his business partner. Barnes said he'd used political pull to get young war-coward Georgie into the National Guard back during Vietnam, The Washington Post reports. With payoff in hand, the whistleblower's memory suddenly got all fuzzy. Miers was also key in wangling Bush out of a jury duty assignment: The standard jury questionnaire would have revealed the drunk driving conviction that Bush had hidden for over 20 years, the Philadelphia Daily News reports. (Yes, Bush is the first convicted criminal ever elected -- or in this case, selected -- president.)

Miers, an ex-Catholic turned hardcore Protestant evangelical, has broader experience, of course. She was the managing partner of a high-powered Texas law firm that, under her gentle Christian guidance, paid out more than $30 million in two separate cases of helping corporate clients defraud their investors, The Huffington Post reports. At the firm, Miers also walked in Our Saviour's footsteps by specializing in union-busting and gutting worker safety protections. As the firm's prospectus proudly noted: "We defend [safety and injury] claims of any type, including multiple death cases." If you accidentally fed a few of your coolies into the company wood-chipper, no worries: Holy Harriet and her crew would have your back.

After [that], Miers moved to the White House, where, as the Los Angeles Times reports, she became Bush's chief gatekeeper for his most important briefings... that somehow lulled the entire Bush team into a deep sleep until Sept. 11. According to Republican Party chairman Ken Mehlman, Miers then became "heavily involved in the War on Terror" that followed the attacks....He said Miers believes that neither the courts nor Congress should "micromanage" the Terror War, i.e., put fetters on the unrestrained powers of the commander-in-chief to kill, incarcerate and torture whom he sees fit....In fact, as White House counsel, Miers "provided the president with guidance on the legal parameters" for the War on Terror, Mehlman said. In other words, Miers helped draw up the "justifications" for torture, rendition and war which she will now be ruling upon at the Supreme Court. Oh, there'll be a hot time in the old gulag when Harriet joins Jughead Roberts on the bench!

Re: The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is Miers, Herself

This is good to know -- just in case, of course.

Lawyers for Republican members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee said Tuesday that President Bush's nomination of White House counsel Harrier Miers for the Supreme Court was uniformly unpopular among committee staffers, and that some questioning her qualifications and conservative pedigree were actively researching ways to rebut arguments put forward in her favor by the White House.


Today's New York Times quoted one GOP lawyer as saying "Everybody is hoping that something will happen on Miers, either that the president would withdraw her or she would realize she is not up to it and pull out while she has some dignity intact."

Miers might be catching some kind of post-Roberts remorse. After all, what did Roberts actually do to be nominated to the Supreme Court, let alone be Chief Justice?

Not much. Maybe a little more than Miers, but not much more. And since, fairly or unfairly, we still tend to view authority figures as white males, Roberts benefitted from looking more the part.

But after all is said and done, both Miers and Roberts got the nomination because they didn't leave a paper trail behind of their views. Great. If we insist on that as the major criterion, we are almost certain to get mediocre people. Any outstanding individual is likely to leave that record-that is why they would be considered outstanding in the first place.

Both Roberts and Miers had nice careers for themselves as lawyers, nice impressive resumés if they are looking for a job in a corporation. Neither one, as I recall, was considered anyone who made people in the legal profession stand up and take notice before they were nominated.

Roberts, however, has left a paper trail of his competence, as evaluated by people who are not his cronies. By contrast, Miers' paper trail documents that she is a Bush crony and little else. That's what makes the big difference to me.

Perhaps so. But at most, that would qualify him for a nice, well-paid corporate job.

If he doesn't have any big decisions, does he at least have some legal papers that made others take notice? I don't believe so.

When somebody says "Supreme Court nomination", I think images of a person with 15 or 20 years on the bench with some major decision or other pops up in your head. If you can't have that, how about some noticeable legal papers or something? Okay, all Supreme Court justices were not long term judges before being nominated. But at least two of those had some outstanding credentials-Earl Warren was governor of California, Thurgood Marshall had won cases overturning century old Jim Crow laws.

Perhaps Roberts had a bit more credentials than Miers, but not that much. I think Miers is catching a little backlash from Roberts' appointment, where we were told that it is not that the President has to show the guy is good, it is up to the opposition to prove that he is very, very bad. Roberts effectively prevented them from showing that he is very, very bad, and bingo!-he's Chief Justice.

I think after it was over, people might have wondered-hey, what just happened?

Why is "governor of California" a credential outstanding enough to appoint someone Chief Justice? Would you be happy if Bush appointed Arnold Schwarzenegger for this position? I wouldn't.

John Roberts is a constitutional lawyer who had argued about 40 cases before the Supreme Court. He has decided several dozens of cases, including constitutional ones, while sitting the DC court of appeals. I don't know how many peer reviewed papers he has published in law journals, and I can't find out because the relevant search engines are proprietary. But even if Roberts has published nothing, his qualifications for the job he is being appointed to are well within the range of what other successful candidates historically had to show. Miers' credentials as a constitutional lawyer are nil.

buncha sexists, that's what I think.

Earl Warren's biography before his Supreme Court days.

Incredible that the Chief Justice most closely identified with the cour's guranteeing of civil rights ordered the evacuation of Japanese Americans during WWII!! But read on.

Source.

For many years, was considered the best district attorney in America-then became Governor of California for several terms. Putting aside his Japanese American record-which was not considered bad by the standard of the time-and I say his appointment, though not without cronyism attached, would be considered a good one even today.