I’ve hear all about how dissatisfied conservatives are with the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination. I’ve heard George Will bemoan it. Even stranger, I’ve heard liberal bloggers support her nomination and even seemingly morph into “Miers Boosters.”
And I’m starting to think that I may be crazy.
The day the conservative bloggers’ heads exploded over Harriet Miers, it all seemed a little too uniform to me. You could all most hear them all marching in lockstep. I know these people specialize in message discipline, but this was a little creepy.
I think someone’s being sold a bill of goods on Miers, but not who we think are being sold. The gay rights candidate questionnaire if you ask me is just a lavender herring. This woman’s red roots go deep. All the way back to the “come to Jesus” moment I’ve referenced before.
“She decided that she wanted faith to be a bigger part of her life,” Justice Hecht, who now serves on the Texas Supreme Court, said in an interview. “One evening she called me to her office and said she was ready to make a commitment” to accept Jesus Christ as her savior and be born again, he said. He walked down the hallway from his office to hers, and there amid the legal briefs and court papers, Ms. Miers and Justice Hecht “prayed and talked,” he said.
She was baptized not long after that, at the Valley View Christian Church.
It was a pivotal personal transformation for the woman now named for a seat on the United States Supreme Court, not entirely unlike that experienced by President Bush and others in the Texas political and business establishment of that time.
Ms. Miers, born Roman Catholic, became an evangelical Christian and began identifying more with Republicans than with the Democrats who had long held sway over Texas politics. She joined the missions committee of her church, which is against legalized abortion, and friends and colleagues say she rarely looked back at her past as a Democrat.
That alone is enough to make me not want her on the Supreme Court, even if her credentials and qualifications were completely above reproach. Am I biased against evangelical christians? Perhaps. If so it’s an earned bias, or a learned reticence. I have the scars to prove it. So, my approach to the “born again” is a wary one, and before I drop my guard they’re going to have to show me exactly why I should.
That “come to Jesus” moment is one reason I’m not convinced that Miers is a Souter in Scalia’s clothing. The other reason is that this is a woman Bush trusts implicitly with his past; enough for her to know “where the bodies are buried.”
If anything, Harriet Miers is a Scalia done up to pass well enough for a Souter to make it through confirmation, so she can sit on the bench and beat her over the head with her bible. If Bush couldn’t be sure that’s just what she’d do, he wouldn’t have appointed her. Look close enough at her record and you’ll see hints of it.
I just can’t believe so many people are falling for it, and so many Dems are either supporting her confirmation or at least not actively opposing it.
Oh well, I’ll just go ahead and start writing my farewells to Roe and Lawrence v. Texas.
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I’m with you, Terrance. I am especially confounded that John, who has a good head on his shoulders, could become so deluded on this. And there is lots of evidence that she will be a swing vote to invalidate Roe. She fought against the ABA endorsement of Roe. She gave money to anti-abortion candidates. And the fact that Harry Reid likes her is not reassuring. Don’t forget; he’s anti-abortion.
Let’s face it. We don’t have the guns to win this time. At the very best, we can fight this tooth and nail, use all our ammo, and end up with a Scalia, like we did after Bork. But we need to fight; just as we should have fought on Roberts. This is all about the next few elections.
And if I’m wrong, and John is right, and she becomes another stealth candidate like Souter, great. But I’m not counting on a Texas Republican to surprise me like a New England Republican could.
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frum and will and all the republican complainers strike me as brer rabbit, begging not to go in the briar patch.
she’s anti-choice, anti-worker, anti-democracy, pro-corporate, pro-theocracy. how much more republican can she be?
I’m with yuy, halfway at least.
I don’t think there has been a uniform conservative response. I’ve seen many who are going full blazes in support of her and Bush. But I too am very uncomfortable with her nomination.
Lookit. She’s a conservative evangelical Christian who is a good Crawford Ranch brush-clearing friend of a conservative evangelical president. You can’t tell me that between the banter and the nicknames that he doesn’t know EXACTLY what she things on verious issues. Anf furthermore, you can’t tell me that Bush would not have gotten Rove and Cheney on board either unless they too know exactly how she thinks.
An addendum…
The reason that I don’t really think the conservative reaction is a “message” thing is that I have signed up to a lot of their E-mail alerts, just to keep an eye on what they are saying to their own constituents. The ones that support Bush (including, as of yesterday, Dobson) are reminding their followers that “he’s one of us.” The ones that are bemoaning this choice are comparing Bush to his father, which is probably one of the worst things an evangelical can say about him. Gary Bauer, in particular, has suddenly become quite the Bush basher. I doubt the White House would be willing to take such a deliberate hit with its own base.
I know what you mean, T. It feels like the conservative pundits are trying to pull the oldest trick in the book, and the Democrats seem to be falling for it.
I’ve been thinking along these lines, too. What makes me suspicious is Dobson & his coy, “I know something you don’t…” act. I keep thinking he’s happy because he got a call from George that basically said, “She’s one of us; she’s a lot more right-wing than people think; and because she has no real record to research, it won’t be obvious until she starts making rulings.” It would not surprise me in the least.