Miers Defense Looks Shaky

The Harriet Miers nomination for the Supreme Court is not going to fail unless she withdraws. If forced to a vote, the GOP will back the president because failing to do so makes him a lame duck with three years to serve. However, it is rather amusing that the White House has offered such a feeble defense for a nominee who enjoys the president’s confidence. Elitism and sexism are not why conservatives are upset.

The White House is not used to Congress standing up to it, and it can’t quite believe that the reactionary right would ever fuss over a presidential action. But the Supreme Court seat is what a great many movement reactionaries have been after ever since Roe v. Wade. They have put up with ballooning deficits, bigger government and foreign wars of aggression to get a 5-4 majority on the only court that matters to them. They want to be damn sure that after paying such heavy dues they get what they want.

So, the White House trots out Mr. Bush’s personal lawyer as a woman fit for the Supreme Court. And perhaps she is, but for once the faith-based GOP isn’t interested in taking the president’s word for it that she is a conservative. They wanted a Scalia, a radical reactionary with the paper trail to prove it. “Trust me” has finally failed the Bush administration. When Vice President Cheney called the "Rush Limbaugh Show" to say that conservatives will look back in 10 years’ time and see what a great appointment it is, Mr. Limbaugh asked the toughest question of all – why must they wait? Indeed, why not the best?

Perhaps the feeble defense of Ms. Miers stems from Karl Rove worrying more about his fourth appearance before a grand jury. The Busheviks immediately claimed that Ms. Miers was being attacked because she didn’t go to an Ivy League school (she attended Southern Methodist University – and she ought to get extra points for getting a degree in mathematics, a field in intense intellectual rigor). When one looks at the President himself, elitism is all one can think – Phillips Academy (Class of 1964), Yale (Skull and Bones, Class of 1968, history), and Harvard Business School (MBA, 1975). Clearly, standards are slipping if the result is Mr. Bush.

And yesterday, the First Lady (Southern Methodist University, bachelor’s in education, Class of 1968 and University of Texas, Austin, Master of Library Science, 1973) said she thought some of the opposition was sexist. The howling from the far right includes pleas for a woman like Priscilla Owen. The complaint isn’t that Ms. Miers is a woman, but that she’s the wrong woman.

The confirmation hearings will be spun eight ways to Sunday by the White House because the administration needs to win. The Bush presidency ends if she fails, rejected by the GOP-controlled Senate, and Congress will begin to feel its oats. However, if the best they can do is suggest the opponents of the nomination are bigots, they may want to reconsider the wisdom of the choice.

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