Friday, October 28, 2005
...The Damage Done
Harriet Miers yesterday morning withdrew her nomination to replace Sandra Day O'Connor as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Right Wing shock radio personality Laura Ingraham, usually good, couldn't stop talking Miers down and laying down rules for the President when he takes his mulligan. The noive. I was so turned off that I tuned the radio to another station and heard Colorado's Governor Owen Bill talk about building a wall (just like the wall in Israel) along our Southern border. It was like entering a different reality. (Owen thinks that the border between the US and Mexico is 600 or 700 miles long (actually it's almost 2,000) but I see I'm digressing).
The good news is that we might get Luttig or McConnell or Janice Rogers Brown as a replacement. The bad news is that we might get another of the President's friends from Texas (now the Attorney General).
The good news is that the President had continued to show that he can recognize and correct mistakes. He got rid of O'Neill pretty quickly and the stupid steel tariffs lasted only about a year and President Bush is also showing signs he's finally waking up to the porous borders and that spending has really gotten out of control.
More good news is now NRO's David Frum has $300,000 in a fund and nothing to spend it on.
Here's some of the bad news --all self inflicted damage. (Some of these come from Hugh Hewitt):
The right's embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left - exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources - will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around. Given the overemphasis on admittedly ambiguous speeches Miers made more than a decade ago, conservative activists will find it difficult to take on liberals in their parallel efforts to destroy some future Robert Bork.
Then there's the delay problem--we're unlikely to have a new Justice before the new year which means that Justice O'Connor, who is staying on until replaced, will hear the parental notification of minor daughter's abortion case at the end of November. I don't expect Justice O'Connor to get that one right. What cases, which a new Justice would have voted differently on, will be heard in December?
But the worst damage is that this idea has hardened concretelike in the communal matrix of accepted concepts: A successful, smart, good lawyer is not good enough for the Supreme Court. We need super intellects, up to their elbows in Supreme Court case arcana in the past 20 years at least, members of the Supreme Court monastery, to be the Justices. And we need this because we've accepted the idea that the Justices are Platonic Guardians and philosopher kings who set the policy of the country and don't just decide law cases. It's terribly difficult to be a Platonic Guardian and you do need the super intellect, but the proper role of a Supreme Court Justice is not that difficult and any successful, smart, good lawyer can fill the role.
I've seen the needle and the damage done, a little part of it in everyone.
The good news is that we might get Luttig or McConnell or Janice Rogers Brown as a replacement. The bad news is that we might get another of the President's friends from Texas (now the Attorney General).
The good news is that the President had continued to show that he can recognize and correct mistakes. He got rid of O'Neill pretty quickly and the stupid steel tariffs lasted only about a year and President Bush is also showing signs he's finally waking up to the porous borders and that spending has really gotten out of control.
More good news is now NRO's David Frum has $300,000 in a fund and nothing to spend it on.
Here's some of the bad news --all self inflicted damage. (Some of these come from Hugh Hewitt):
The right's embrace in the Miers nomination of tactics previously exclusive to the left - exaggeration, invective, anonymous sources, an unbroken stream of new charges, television advertisements paid for by secret sources - will make it immeasurably harder to denounce and deflect such assaults when the Democrats make them the next time around. Given the overemphasis on admittedly ambiguous speeches Miers made more than a decade ago, conservative activists will find it difficult to take on liberals in their parallel efforts to destroy some future Robert Bork.
Then there's the delay problem--we're unlikely to have a new Justice before the new year which means that Justice O'Connor, who is staying on until replaced, will hear the parental notification of minor daughter's abortion case at the end of November. I don't expect Justice O'Connor to get that one right. What cases, which a new Justice would have voted differently on, will be heard in December?
But the worst damage is that this idea has hardened concretelike in the communal matrix of accepted concepts: A successful, smart, good lawyer is not good enough for the Supreme Court. We need super intellects, up to their elbows in Supreme Court case arcana in the past 20 years at least, members of the Supreme Court monastery, to be the Justices. And we need this because we've accepted the idea that the Justices are Platonic Guardians and philosopher kings who set the policy of the country and don't just decide law cases. It's terribly difficult to be a Platonic Guardian and you do need the super intellect, but the proper role of a Supreme Court Justice is not that difficult and any successful, smart, good lawyer can fill the role.
I've seen the needle and the damage done, a little part of it in everyone.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 6:39 AM 
