Tornado Alley (PROG)

[My Dime]

The Miers Mess Continues/Nobel Peace Prize Is a Slap to Bush
The Harriet Miers nomination is becoming more and more a mess for Bush. Yesterday, Bush participated in a tribute for William F. Buckley, and the audience included many a conservative leader--George F. Will, Bill Kristol--who have denounced Bush for selecting Miers. Today Charles Krauthammer, a conservative columnist, called on Bush to withdraw this nomination, accusing Bush of mounting "a sorry retreat into smallness." Ouch!

What is most amusing is how Bush-backers have been defending this nomination. As E.J. Dionne points out in his column today, advocates of Miers are running around telling people she is an evangelical Christian. But wait a minute. When Democrats in the past have suggested that it might be appropriate to ask whether the religious beliefs of a judicial nominee might cause him or her to rule a certain way (particularly on abortion rights), Republicans have howled that this was unfair. They even accused the Democrats of being anti-Catholic. But now Miers fans are selling her partly on the basis on her faith. Since when was that a qualification for being a Supreme Court justice?

Then there's the loyalty argument--which is a spin-off of Bush's trust-me argument. Bush has declared that he knows Miers' heart and character and that this ought to be good enough for conservatives. But many of his rightist allies don't possess that kind of faith. But Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the Southern Baptist Convention defended the Miers pick by noting that Texans like Bush and Miers value loyalty and courage. He said, "If she were to rule in ways that are contrary to the way the president would want her to rule, it would be a deep personal betrayal." So the point is to put rubber-stamps for the president on the Supreme Court? Is Land suggesting that Miers' loyalty is to Bush not to the Constitution?

Two days ago, Ed Gillespie, the former Enron lobbyist who now helps the White House with Supreme Court appointments, told a gathering of perturbed conservatives that their criticism of Miers was elitist and sexist. But that was a miscalculation on his part. The cons quickly fired back that there were plenty of female jurists who were known rightwing legal warriors who they would prefer over Miers. Score this, cranky conservatives 1, Gillespie 0.

But my favorite argument deployed by Bush is his claim that not only does he know her heart but that he knows--for sure!--that she will not change her views in the next 20 years. This, of course, is an overreaction to David Souter. (Conservatives will never forgive Bush's father for Souter.) But is rigidity an asset? Moreover, let's look at where Miers was, say, seventeen years ago. She was giving money to the Al Gore campaign and the Democratic Party. So if she has shifted from Democratic-backer to Republican backer (and evangelical Christian) in that time, who's to say that in two decades she's not going to be somewhere different from where she is now?

Its important to remember that none of this nonsense would have transpired had Bush picked a nominee with strong and obvious credentials (whether a known rightwing champion or not). This is a jam entirely of Bush's own making. It would truly be entertaining, if the future of the nation was not at stake.
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Congratulations to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency for bagging this year's Nobel Peace Prize. This is a tribute to the IAEA's good work but also a slap at the Bush gang. Remember the Bushies--particularly John Bolton--tried to boot ElBaradei from this post--which was an absurd move. After all, when it came to sussing out Iraq's nuclear weapons capabilities, ElBaradei and his IAEA got it right, and the Bush crew got it way wrong. Before the war, Dick Cheney and others claimed that Iraq had revived its nuclear weapons program and that was one reason why war was necessary. ElBaradie and his IAEA inspectors reported there was no evidence that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program. It's good to see that truth matters--at least to the Nobel committee.
http://www.davidcorn.com/