Varifrank: Why Would I Vote For Miers?

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Why Would I Vote For Miers?

...Just for the sheer fun of watching this man break down in tears.

For a further explanation - Read Big Lizards

I like George Will, I really do. But I find his final epistle to the conservative faithful regarding Harriet Miers to be the last piece of evidence I need to be sure that the President has made the right choice for the right reasons. Any decision that makes this many people in the chattering class froth at the mouth has got to be a good one.

Oh, and I just want to say that I found Mr. Wills statement that "The President has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. " to be an insult on par with any slander handed by Moveon.org or from the desk of Howard Dean.

Mr. Bush may not have the background and the forethought or the critical thinking skills that would make Mr. Will swoon, but he has managed to do two things in his “Flowers for Algernon” life that Mr. Will has not:

1) He managed to stop wearing bow ties when he started wearing pants that went all the way to the floor which was roughly the same time his mother Barbara stopped asking him to "put it on" for the annual family Easter photograph.

2) He became President by the largest number of votes cast for a candidate in history.

It is not up to east coast twaddle merchants like Mr. Will to determine “what is and is not a conservative” and god help us all if we start looking that far to the east for guidance in that matter. Electoral leadership provided by these “cool, cool conservative men” lead the Republican Party from disaster to disaster in election after election for almost three decades. It is also not up to Mr. Will to determine who is and who is not good enough to sit on the Supreme Court. That job dear sir is the Presidents, who then passes it on to the Senate for their approval, and thus by proxy the people of the United States. Mr. Will fits into neither of those roles, his vote and voice is no more or less than mine, and to that I can only say, “thank god”.

The time to decide if Bush was up to the job of picking a Supreme Court Justice was last November, not this October. Shockingly, Mr. Will, Goldberg, Krystol and Bork all decided not to publish their collective “ Bush is a poor conservative and cant pick judges because he’s a big dumb hick evangelical from Texas and we all know what they are like don’t we?” posts back then where they could be assured that people would have listened and that President Bush would not return to a position where he could put his choices before the Senate for consideration.

The alternate universe points us to a world where instead of being forced to accept a choice from that inbred Texan, President Chimpy McHitler Jr; Messers. Will, Goldberg, Krystol and Bork would be writing Oped articles in support of President Kerry and his fabulously intelligent and oh so conservative choices for Supreme Court.

Oh, of course not. They would be screaming about how it is the end of America as we know it, and what’s worse, they would probably be blaming it all on the failed Bush campaign that doomed the Republican party and the country into a new Liberal dark age. There is just no pleasing some people.

Gentleman - and all the rest of you who are so up in arms about the end of the world; which has been brought on by the oh so horrid nomination of Harriet Miers, I have to remind you of something simple and basic on our daily lives. This world is not a perfect world, It’s not Heaven that has fallen, its not Hell that has risen, its simply life. Some of it is good, and some of it is bad, if you live long enough you learn to roll with the punches and not be surprised when things don’t necessarily go your way. Despite what you may think and wish, It’s not all about you.

You will not get everything you want in this life, but you’ll find sometimes, you get what you need.

No “Conservative” pundit has explained to me where the votes are going to come from to get the kind of candidates they say are “so much better” than Harriet Miers. Mr. Bush has always had to deal with a Senate that is far from Conservative and barely Republican. That’s a fact, and knowing that fact, it changes your approach as President when it comes to dealing with the nomination process. Try to remember that there is not an infinite amount of time in which to engage in these esoteric conversations about “who should and should not be on the court” at any point in the term of office. Every man hour spent on this task is a man hour from something, dare I say, more important, like keeping Iran from flipping the oil markets into the Euro to the devastation the American economy.

Given the Presidents record on judicial choices, at all levels, I see a regular and repeated record of solid choices, they have been and continue to be, dare I say it, good conservative choices. I also voted for him in November. So what would I be saying about who I am if I suddenly jumped off my sofa, stood in the window and shouted; “ I want to end it all, my President betrayed me!!” and then threatened to jump because I didn’t get my way on this nomination? Would Mr. Will say I was a real conservative for feeling his outrage?

Well I guess if I wore a bowtie, I guess you could say I had my Costume for Halloween( see picture above).

For all the good it will do me or my country, I can wish all I want for another candidate, and yeah I do wish I had seen other people up for the job, Frankly, I would LOVE to see a candidate go before the Senate and pull an Oliver North and stuff it right back in their bloated Senatorial faces, something like this:

Candidate: Yeah, I joined the Federalist Society; You wanna make something of it “Senator Spectre?”

Sen. Specter: Now wait just a darn min..

Candidate: (coughing into hand - Bite me. Cough cough… bite me, ahem, cough) sorry sir, I have a little cold.

Sen. Specter: What? did you just tell me to..,oh nevermind. What’s your opinion on Roe V. Wade? I suppose your going to cower behind the microphone and not answer that one are you smart guy?

Candidate: Oh I’ll answer it, I’m happy to. Its bad law plain and simple. You know its bad law, every lawyer in this room knows its bad law. It exists because everyone in this room knows that if its overturned, that a good percentage of states will vote to outlaw the practice of abortion and an almost equal percentage will vote to keep it. Unfortunate as the chaos that cause may seem, that’s the system we have, unless of course, and it pains me to say this, we should want to create a Constitutional amendment that does what Blackmun invented, and that is create a right to privacy. That Process of amendment Senator, is something I can get behind, even if it does support abortion as a result because the Constitution allows for it and the people are engaged in the process. In my opinion, there is a serious hole in the Constitution when it comes to the right of privacy, but the way to cure that hole isn’t to repair it with ruling after ruling in piecemeal fashion, its through the legislature and through the people themselves. People like to talk about how important one Justice on the Supreme Court is to the law, but that’s because they don’t want to deal with the messy and difficult process of Democracy. Unfortunately for you and yours Senator, that process is in the Constitution and if you ever bothered to read it you could see it for yourself. We aren’t supposed to fix things that are messy just because it makes our jobs easier, our job, the job of the judicial branch, is to simply determine if the law in question works in accordance to the constitution. Our job is not to usurp the process of the Legislature or the Executive branch, anymore than yours is to do the same with the Executive of the Judicial...

But I’m not going to get that candidate. I live in a different world from the one I want. I live here and I live now and I accept it for what it is,; not pine for what it should be. It’s not perfect, but it is very nice and considering the alternatives, it’s not so bad.

I don’t think President Kerry would have nominated Harriet Miers. But I also don’t think he would have nominated John Roberts. But try to imagine what he would have nominated, and then try to imagine the number of “Republican” Senators, who believe that for Democrats at least, the President, whomever he is, should get his choice approved and thus, we have a Judge Ginsburg just for that reason.

We are not done with Judicial choices for this administration, but unless the Wills, the Goldbergs the Krystols, the Borks et al decide once and for all what side they really are on, they could end up with a Senate back in the hands of the Democrats, possibly even the House. I’m sure if that were to happen the President would have loads of time in which to have afternoon tea and discuss the perfect candidate upon learning of the death of Judges Stevens or Ginsberg.

Decide Gentleman, “Perfect” you cant get or "good enough" that you can. And guess which one you are going to get first and thank your lucky stars you will never be in a position to choose one over the other. The President has that choice, and I’m grateful it’s him that’s making it and not you or me.

Posted @ October 23, 2005 08:20 PM | Current Affairs

1. You've used a picture of Will with a regular tie rather than a bow tie. Trivial, but if you're going to go on about it...

2. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding your position, but it sounds like you're in favor of the president's nominee, regardless of who it is. It also appears that dissenting from that nominee is treason to the conservative side? (I'd use a weaker term than "treason" but my vocabulary fails me at the moment).

3. I would think it's the duty of the base to insist on the best nominee possible, even if that person will be difficult to confirm. I think conservative principles are more important than a single leader.

Posted by: Whelk at October 24, 2005 07:15 AM

1. Corrected. I just thought the other picture looked funnier, but you are correct.

2. Fovor it or disfavor it, its not my call. With the exception of the damage that has been done to the Repubilican party because shes been nominated and not accepted by factions of the party, I dont see Mrs. Miers as a bad candidate in any way, but as I said, its not my call. Its sad to say that her nomination has fractured the party to a point where Im not sure it can be put back together. I question if it was all worth it. The President for nominating her, and the backbenchers for destroying the winning coalition to make their point.

3. If you voted for him November then you trust him in October. If you dont trust him now, why did you vote for him then? Would you prefer to go back and do the election over, knowing who his opposition was and where we would be today had the other side won?

I've seen scant evidence that President Bush is a conservative of the stripe that would pass muster by those who are most vociferously opposed to Harriet Miers but I think hes vastly more of a conservative than the majority of the Senate.

Posted by: varifrank at October 24, 2005 08:22 AM

I'm not willing to concede that point 3 is a fair one. Out of the candidates available, there were none that I agree with on every single issue. Thus I had to choose my candidate while accepting that on some issues I was likely to fervently disagree with him. I think most voters realize this tradeoff, and that while there is a split on this issue, the right will easily come together on others. As fractures go, I'm predicting that this one is largely forgotton within a few months.

Posted by: Whelk at October 25, 2005 08:39 AM

I thought about this one for a long time and what it comes down to for me is this; that there are two fundamental things camps at work here.

Some people believe that a Supreme Court Justice must be the very best and most learned scholar with loads of judicial background in order that they may be able to understand the intricacies of the document.

Other people believe that the document is simple and straightforward and more to the point was designed specifically to be read and understood by the average citizen.

I am of the latter camp. I believe it is fundametnally dangerous for our republic to begin to fall into the trap that says that only a small number of the very smartest people are capable of interpreting the law. It is a very short step from that idea to the idea that these people are in fact the law itself. If that were to happen, what kind of democracy do we have. We are dangerously close to that time already, there are those who believe that all that stands between ourselves and disaster is who sits on the Supreme Court. Well, I say "baloney". If we find ourselves demanding the the Justices of the Supreme Court must have "super powers", then we give credence to the idea of legislature by judicial fiat. We give credence to the idea that some men are better than other men. If however, the supreme court is simply another function of the constitutional system by which we all operate than it can be said to be no more powerful than the Legislature or the Executive Branch.

Harriet Miers, is no scholar on the law. She is a citizen who has the ability to speak bilingually between the normal language of every day people and that obscure language used only by lawyers. Harriet Miers does not come from a Ivy League college, she comes from the South. Harriet Miers has worked most of her life, not as a lawyer but as a business manager and partner.

In the context of my model of "the two camps", I find all of these attributes to be acceptible for a candidate of the Supreme Court, in fact I find them to be desireable.

Did she give to Democrats back in the 80's was she a Democrat? Did she support Affirmative action and racial quotas back long ago? In my experince, most people were Democrats a long time ago and also support lots of really dumb ideas that were fashionable at the time but have since been discredited. Things, and people, have changed. Heck, I voted fo Andersen in 1980.

I also find it repulsive that so many people who drive with cars that have bumper stickers that support the President and say "United We Stand" are so willing to abandon him over such a simple issue. There is no surety in the choice of Supreme Court, lots of great candidates turn out to be stiffs later on, and lots of stiffs turn out to be great, like that Nixon crony Rhenquist for example. As I said in an earlier post, a good resume is no guarantee of success. Character matters, and its hard to judge character unless you know the person. President Bush as worked personally with Mrs. Miers for years. Some call that "cronyism", but I cant understand that label being applied in this case, when the Vice-President, Secretary of Defense, State and many many other key figures in the administration are all in that same category and are much much bigger cronys than she could ever be.

Posted by: varifrank at October 25, 2005 09:14 AM

Great post!

No one ever went broke underestimating the arrogance of pundits. I guess that someone like Will thought Bush was OK as long as he kept with the program. But now that he's nominated an outsider, someone a bit (gasp!) like him, the fangs and claws come out.

There is no doubt it's possible to mount substantive arguments that Miers wasn't a good pick, but it's also possible to do so without the sort of gratuitous insults and sanctimonious superiority that Will, et. al. seem to be slinging around these days.

I wrote a post the other day about how narrow-minded and short-sighted it is to act as though RINOs are the enemy of the Republican Party, quite similar to your point--"what would they prefer, that Kerry got to pick?" and "the perfect is the enemy of the good." http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com/2005/10/dont-make-rinos-endangered-species.html

Posted by: neo-neocon at October 25, 2005 06:43 PM