Conservative Mags on Miers

MORE: Condi drinks the Kool-Aid?

• The Weekly Standard: Editor William Kristol is anti Miers. So are two of his writers. First, London Times reporter and WS contributor Gerard Baker:

  It is not just that she is so obviously unfit to hold the office of associate justice of the Supreme Court, though she is certainly that. It is the simple, depressing lack of seriousness demonstrated by the White House in coming up with such a candidate, the sheer cramped and occluded smallness of the thinking that now seems to characterize the Bush administration's approach to governing.
  
  It is hard to overstate the mood of demoralization among conservatives in America. The rising tide of disillusionment is ready to break the dam of loyalty. . .
  
  The trouble with Harriet is that it's the conception that's all wrong. For decades conservatives in America have had to put up with a judiciary that clings obstinately to the verities of New Deal and Great Society liberalism; activist, interventionist judges repeatedly "finding" new constitutional rights that fit with their own political outlook. At last, President Bush had an opportunity to reverse that. Three months ago, he picked John Roberts to be first an associate of the nine member court, and then chief justice. It is hard to think of someone who better personifies the conservative's ideal of what a judge should be--brilliant, experienced, humble, wedded to the juridical principles of limited government.
  
  And then along comes Miers to fill the spot on the Court that could prove to be the pivotal one, the position that could change the direction of American jurisprudence for decades.

  Next, Jonathan Last in a Philadelphia Inquirer Op-Ed:

  [E]ven Republicans who support Miers can't but be embarrassed by the nominee. Last week, Arlen Specter told the New York Times that Miers "needs a crash course in constitutional law" - a subject the Supreme Court addresses from time to time - while Dan Coats, Miers' confirmation sherpa, skated up to the Hruska line by telling CNN that "if [being a] great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole." . . .
  
  The near unanimity of conservative thinkers against the Miers appointment shows that conservatives are willing to stand on principle. By and large, their opposition has been independent of politics. One could reasonably expect that Miers will vote roughly with Chief Justice John G. Roberts. But the worry from conservatives isn't that Miers is another David Souter. It's that they think the Supreme Court deserves better than a serial flatterer who earnestly tells people Bush was "the best governor ever" and "the most brilliant man" she's ever met, one who "votes right." . . .
  
  By standing up to Harriet Miers, conservatives have proven that they've still got life in them - and ensured that they'll still be relevant long after President Bush retires to Crawford.

  Finally, Powerline's Paul Mirengoff worries, in last week's Standard, what rejecting Harriet might wrought:

  [T]he politics of the confirmation process tell us that a standard under which conservative senators vote against nominees in, say, the Sandra Day O'Connor mold, is a standard that might well lead non-conservative senators (that is to say a majority) to vote against the next Antonin Scalia.

• The National Review: Like the Standard, NR's editors oppose Miers. Unlike the Standard, National Review's launched an on-line petition calling for Harriet's withdraw. NR's John Podhoretz scoffs:

  [T]here's absolutely no reason to think that Harriet Miers will withdraw her own name or that President Bush will withdraw it. If my dear friend David Frum's petition ends up with 50,000 names on it, that won't change things a whit.

  But NR's White House correspondent Byron York predicts a tough Senate battle:

  [T]here is no doubt that the Miers nomination has sewn discord and discontent among the groups that are nominally in favor of her confirmation. The groups hold a daily strategy conference call which, in the last ten days, has at times become contentious. "We've all had some fairly nasty exchanges," says one person familiar with the calls. In such an environment, name-calling is not terribly unusual. For example, one conservative said of Progress for America, "They are a bunch of political hacks and they do what the White House wants. You could nominate Humpty Dumpty for the Supreme Court, and they'd be out arguing for Humpty Dumpty." That's not the kind of thing one hears in a well organized, unified movement.

• American Spectator: Editor R. Emmett Tyrrell supports Miers, seemingly reluctantly:

  I do not mean to say that there are not potential high court nominees more qualified than Miers. Moreover, for two decades the conservative movement has developed a community of fine legal minds ready and able to do as well against the haranguers of the Senate Judiciary Committee as the suddenly exalted John Roberts. One need look no farther than the Federalist Society. Yet the intensity of this row has grown out of all proportion to the President's oversights. . .
  
  The criteria for a Supreme Court nominee have historically been: (A) proven facility with the law and (B) personal integrity. That is the argument most conservatives have made ever since liberals politicized the selection process starting with Judge Robert Bork. Surely Miers has shown facility with the law and if she lacks integrity it will be revealed very soon. We have all argued that a justice's personal beliefs are not relevant. All a justice does is apply the law -- as written by legislators -- to each case under consideration. Judge Roberts returned to this truth repeatedly during his torture before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If Miers is capable, she will hold to this fundamental truth and be nominated.
  
  Were the Republicans to overthrow the principles they solemnly defended during the Roberts hearing and sink Miers' nomination, the consequence would be anarchy in subsequent Senate hearings and a messy victory for partisan Democrats. The Republicans have claimed the principle that barring maleficent revelations a president should be granted his nominee for the federal judiciary. If they were to join the Democrats in contradicting their own sensible principle and thwarting the President, the partisan Democrats would be justified in voting down any future conservative nominee. That would mean raising to the Supreme Court only nominees of their choice or, as I say, anarchy.¹

  On the other hand, Andrew Cline, who runs the editorial page at the Manchester Union Leader wrote the best anti-Miers article I've read in the Spectator last week. And John Tabin's piece from Friday is pretty good:

  The more we learn about Harriet Miers, the less there is to like. David Brooks wrote yesterday that in her "President's Opinion" column that Miers wrote for the Texas Bar Journal, "the quality of thought and writing doesn't even rise to the level of pedestrian." . . . Okay, so Miers can't write. On the Supreme Court she'd have clerks to help her with that. . .
  
  When Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed 96-3, most Republican senators deferred to Bill Clinton on the principle that elections have consequences, and Clinton had won an election after pledging to nominate liberal judges. But George W. Bush pledged to nominate conservative judges. Don't Senators owe at least as much deference to Bush's constituents as they do to Bush himself?
  
  If Harriet Miers joins the Court and turns out, as I fear she will, to be weak on a number of constitutional issues and consistently strong only on abortion, it will create new and worrisome political rifts on the Right. When judicial conservatives can no longer be sure that an anti-Roe judge will be fairly strong across the board, they will begin to part ways with their social conservative allies. Before supporting Miers, conservative senators should think carefully about whether loyalty to the President is worth the potentially devastating results for the conservative movement.

I understand the concerns of Tyrrell, Hewitt and Mirengoff. I just think they're palpably misplaced and slyly misapplied: Scalia -- formerly a law professor at Virginia and Chicago, then a D.C. Circuit judge for four years -- plainly was more capable and suitable when nominated than Harriet is today. When applied to Democrats, nothing changes. Despite being a liberal former ACLU general counsel, Ruth Bader Ginsburg was qualified for the job. I supported her confirmation--but would have opposed David Kendall, had President Clinton been foolish enough to nominate his lawyer.

Pro-Miers conservatives deploy a scare-tactic straw-man unrelated to the principle involved. Opposing Miers will prevent future Kendalls--without obstructing future Ginsburgs or Scalias. What's wrong with that?

Miers Oppositum Est.

MORE:

Secretary of State Rice endorsed Harriet Miers. So National Review Online editor "K Lo" (Kathryn Jean Lopez) bailed on Condi in 2008.

STILL MORE:

Departing from his usual populist nonsense, Pat Buchanan gets it right:

The problem with Bush's selection process is this: He included so many extraneous disqualifiers that he eliminated all of the most qualified. In the hallowed name of "diversity," excellence was thrown out the window.

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¹ Pro-Miers chieftain Hugh Hewitt makes the same point in the (Christian perspective) World Magazine:

[M]any so-called conservatives have eagerly embraced the weapons of borking, originally forged on anvils of the left, for use in their crusade against Harriet Miers, even though she is pro-life, pro-gun, and loyal to the president. Those tactics? Anonymous allegations of intellectual deficiency, rumors of scandals as yet unrevealed, hints of jurisprudential unreliability, and—of course—relentless personal attacks.

It will be difficult for conservatives to object in the future to the employ of such tactics against nominees they favor. Similarly, the demand laid down by some on the right for a "paper trail" and certainty on judicial philosophy will morph into a demand by Senate Democrats for the same, and the objections mounted in the past to various lines of questioning will certainly sound hollow coming from any pundit denouncing Ms. Miers now for her purported lack of an "overarching" judicial philosophy.

(via Right Wing News, Patterico, Hugh Hewitt, reader appell8 and Stan)