All the great choices and he gives us this nonsense. What's wrong with having a fight over confirmation? And why pick someone 60 years old? It's just another weakass move in what's becoming a Republican party unwilling to stand up for conservative principles.
David Frum:
I worked with Harriet Miers. She's a lovely person: intelligent, honest, capable, loyal, discreet, dedicated ... I could pile on the praise all morning. But there is no reason at all to believe either that she is a legal conservative or--and more importantly--that she has the spine and steel necessary to resist the pressures that constantly bend the American legal system toward the left. This is a chance that may never occur again: a decisive vacancy on the court, a conservative president, a 55-seat Republican majority, a large bench of brilliant and superbly credentialed conservative jurists ... and what has been done with the opportunity?
I am not saying that Harriet Miers is not a legal conservative. I am not saying that she is not steely. I am saying only that there is no good reason to believe either of these things. Not even her closest associates on the job have good reason to believe either of these things. In other words, we are being asked by this president to take this appointment purely on trust, without any independent reason to support it. And that is not a request conservatives can safely grant.
There have just been too many instances of seeming conservatives being sent to the high Court, only to succumb to the prevailing vapors up there: O'Connor, Kennedy, Souter. Given that record, it is simply reckless for any conservative president to take a hazard on anything other than a known quantity of the highest intellectual and personal excellence.
Absolutely!
UPDATE: Cheney is sent to Rush to sell us.
RUSH: I think back to President Clinton. When he had the opportunity to nominate Ruth Bader Ginsburg, he chose, I mean, liberals that were liberals without question, card-carrying ACLU members. They had a very strong, discernible liberal record. There was no question about them, no doubt about their activist philosophies at all. . . but this one has some people scratching their heads because we seem to pick a nominee here that is oriented in some way to placating Democrats. We seem to be concerned with what liberal senators are going to say about them and think of them, and so we have a nominee here with a record that is difficult to discern.
1 comment:
I was one who was hoping for a fight, but alas, the GOP knows we conservatives have nowhere else to go.
The upside of having the fight is that it forces the left to go on record. The problem with having the fight is twofold -- (1) it forces the GOP to go on record too, which can cause (or make manifest) division inside the party, and (2) the left is gifted at deception, evasion, redirection, misdirection, and projection.
That Miers contributed to Gore and Bentsen is not necessarily meaningful. Law firm CEOs frequently contribute to both sides, plus that was a long time ago. Lots of lefties turn right as they mature.
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