Bush Selects Harriet Miers to Fill O’Connor’s Seat

President Bush has once again opted for someone he knows in filling a government job. However, in selecting Harriet Miers to succeed Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court, he’s made a choice with which the entire country must live for many years after he has gone. The choice is not a priori a bad selection, but it does little to dispel the belief that Mr. Bush is incapable of broadening the national talent pool beyond his own small cabal.

The media will pick Ms. Miers’ history to pieces long before the Senate begins confirmation hearings, and there is probably a significant wing of the Democratic Party that simply won’t accept any Bush appointee. However, there is no rule that a member of the court must have been a judge before – Ms. Miers is a lawyer and was the first woman hired at Locke Purnell Boren Laney & Neely, what would be a “white shoe” firm were it not based in Dallas (“white cowboy boot?”). She was the first woman president of the Dallas Bar Association, elected in 1985, and became the first woman president of the Texas State Bar in 1992. In short, she’s probably a damn fine legal mind.

Moreover, any lawyer with any litigation experience can be a judge. Listening to the arguments of others is much easier than fashioning an argument of one’s own. The tricky part of being a judge is in procedure. This usually falls to the lower courts to settle. Rarely does the Supreme Court have to deal with procedural issues. Moreover, some of the most respected “Supremes” came from other areas of American government: Earl Warren was governor of California (and there’s a job for Mr. Schwarzenegger that isn’t constitutionally beyond his Austrian birth) before Ike moved him to the court, and William Howard Taft was a former president ("I don't remember that I ever was President,” he said praising his time on the court.)

What is more irksome is Mr. Bush’s insistence on picking people from his gang, filling government vacancies like the Secretary General of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union used to do. Mr. Bush called his nominee a “pit bull in size 6 shoes” back in 1996, apparently a compliment. He’s known her for a long time, and she’s been in the White House inner circle for five years. Yet a look at Mr. Bush’s record is far from comforting.

Secretary of Defense Field Marshall von Rumsfeld sent too few troops into Iraq claiming he knew better than the entire Pentagon how to fight a modern war. Mr. Bush’s economic team has turned hundreds of billions in government surpluses into similarly sized deficits, while there are more Americans in poverty than in on Inauguration Day 2001. And the posterboy for Bushevik cronyism, Michael Brown at FEMA, may be a case of incompetence actually killing American citizens. Ms. Miers appears to be a qualified lawyer, but her endorsement by a president whose judgment has proved so poor in the last five years must count against her.


© Copyright 2005 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.
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