Everybody is good at something, and George Bush is good at insulting our intelligence.
By picking Harriet Miers, his former personal attorney, he is telling the American people she is the most qualified person in the country to join the Supreme Court. Oh really?
Bush insists that Miers is a good constitutionalist. But consider the source. This is the same man who gave us No Child Left Behind, who signed McCain-Feingold, and who claims the power to imprison American citizens indefinitely without charge just by branding them, without appeal, enemy combatants.
3 comments:
I agree with all of these comments. Bush's nomination of Miers reveals him and his inner circle to suffer from extreme hubris. Interjecting her christian values into the discussion is especially appalling. Her religious views and convictions should and must play no role in what should be a very simple job: compare laws passed by federal and state legislatures, presidential actions, and previous Supreme Court decisions with the constitution, and decide if the constitution forbids them.
If Miers supports or opposes abortion, for example, must be irrellevent to a challenge to Roe. There must be only one question, in this example: Does the US Constitution forbid state governments from outlawing abortion? This is not a moral question, it is a legal question. By interjecting morality, Bush has started playing the same game that leftists have played with the supreme court. This is the reason that supreme court nominations have become political: supreme court judges have been making their legal decisions based on their moral convictions rather than on interpretation of law.
Thus half of Bush's base has rightly joined his loyal opposition for what I hope is a defeat. Last night on Hardball Chris Mathews and Robert Bork excoriated some writings of Meirs'. Bork says that she has never produced any legal writing, only occassional newspaper commentaries, which lead him to conclude that she can only express herself with the most banal cliches, most of them business school gibberish. The exerpts placed on the TV screen were inchomprehensible, and -- for a potential supreme court nominee -- embarrassing.
Furthermore, Bush has undermined his base supporters in another way. The democratic minority in the senate has previously used parlor tricks to keep nominees from getting "up or down" 51%-wins voting in the full senate. They have stupidly used the excuse that they are merely ensuring against an unchecked president simply picking whomever he wants, with not having to secure senate approval. This explanation is preposterous because the full senate vote of 51% approval constitutes senate endorsement. In times when The People have elected a senate that does not 50% support the president, the president must of course nominate a comprimise candidate. The democrats use parlor tricks to insure that this is a case even when The People have elected only a minority of democrat senators.
By nominating a light-weight like Meiers, Bush reveals that he really does view a republican-majority senate as a mere rubber stamp for his selections. I am glad that the republicans seem to be rising to the occassion, forcing Bush to nominate somebody that a majority of the Senate can support. If Bush pleases me by replacing this nominee with an intellectual and legal heavyweight like Robert Bork or Janice Rogers Brown -- who are also strict interpreters of the constitution -- he will unite his base, but face livid opposition from the leftists. And this is what we need.
PS: I also oppose Nadir's president on McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform, which I think is unconstitutional, and I am glad that the constitution forbids this), imprisoning all the accused terrorists outside of the regular judicial system (which I think is unconstitutional, and I am glad that the constitution forbids this), and the torture situation, which I think is serious and that Bush is at fault for this 100%, either by ordering it or failing to make non-torture a top priority.
As for No Child Left Behind, which the leftists originally created, I mostly support it.
From the article: I think this is another good point...
"Bush’s second insult to our intelligence came in his big speech seeking to jump-start support for his “war on terror.” He said, “Some have also argued that extremism has been strengthened by the actions of our coalition in Iraq, claiming that our presence in that country has somehow caused or triggered the rage of radicals. I would remind them that we were not in Iraq on September the 11th, 2001 — and al-Qaeda attacked us anyway. The hatred of the radicals existed before Iraq was an issue, and it will exist after Iraq is no longer an excuse.”
To be fair, we can’t be sure if Bush presumes we are morons or if he is sincerely ignorant. For Muslims, Arabs, and many Americans, U.S. intervention in Iraq had been an issue for 10 years before September 11, 2001. The U.S. air force routinely bombed the country and killed innocent people, while a U.S.-led embargo took hundreds of thousands of children’s lives and created great hardship.
Whether insult or ignorance, this really has to stop."
Post a Comment