Holy Harriet!

I’ve been following the controversy over the latest nominee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers. There seems to be a unique strategy at work here: if you can’t find a person whom everyone (whether they’re conservative or liberal) will support, at least find someone that everyone despises. Recent news articles have listed these salient points about her qualifications for the highest court in the land:

• She “never, ever, says anything that might in the slightest way be construed as critical of George W. Bush”.

• She’s a “fiercely competitive tennis player”.


• In the past, she has been “known more for meticulousness, sometimes fussiness, than for great wisdom and piercing insight”.


• She has “no record of decisions or judicial opinions or scholarly articles”.


• She once stated that George Bush was “the most brilliant man she ever met”.


• She is a “born-again evangelical” who shares the church’s position that life begins at conception (certain to influence any opinion on Roe v. Wade).


• She has failed to “demonstrate in any public way that she is a passionate advocate of judicial restraint”.

There are so many examples of her lack of ability for this job from other sources, it would be unnecessarily redundant to list them here. It’s been bad enough that Bush has repeatedly stacked his administration with hacks and cronies. So far, with the notable exception of Michael Brown, few of them have done any serious damage to the nation (domestically speaking, that is. on foreign policy...er, let's not even go there). But this “pit bull in size 6 shoes”, as she has been called, has the potential to undo decades of mostly competent jurisprudence from the Supreme Court bench. While I fear that the President will respond to the wails from the right by choosing an even more conservative nominee should Miers fail to be confirmed, it was an incredible blunder to pick her in the first place. The American people deserve better.