Looks like the President took the Krauthammer strategy.
SATURDAY UPDATE: Attila, who did a great job of covering the Miers fiasco, sums up my reaction to her withdrawal perfectly.I never did pile on the Oppose-Harriet bandwagon. But The Husband and I weren't thrilled about the nomination at the start because of her lack of judicial experience. After reading the documents on Smoking Gun, learning that once she was a Catholic but then became an Evangelical, and once was a Democrat but then became a Republican, I wasn't so sure that she would, indeed, be the same person 20 years from now that she is today, as the President tried to reassure us.
I shared the concerns of many that she didn't have the intellectual ability to serve on the Supreme Court, and that all the "good intentions" in the world aren't enough if you can't put together a coherent argument for your principles.
My first request to the President for his new nominee: Please, we don't need an affirmative action program for the Supreme Court! I don't care if we have another woman on the court; just give us a solid nomination.
1 comment:
I wasn't worried about drift as much as I was about Harriet's ideology now. Her arc is similar to that of many Americans - from liberal to conservative - which only continues as we get older.
I don't know about evidence of her intellectual rigour, though it was beginning to look as if the trait she most shared with Bush was a solid commitment to certain social issues, such as Bush's adherance to the WOT, but that everything else was a bird's eye view of coordinating what people seem to want (example, papers from her stint as Pres of the Texas bar that support an ICC).
I'm on the fence about women serving and the affirmative action angle. After Bader Ginsberg and O'Connor, it's clear that ideology and an understanding of the importance of constructionism is more important. Then again, Breyer and Souter show that liberality isn't a gender trait, so it's a wash.
In legislative representation, I think there is benefit to having people from different backgrounds working together; in parsing the Constitution, it should be meaningless.
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