Classical Values :: Nothing to chew on?

October 04, 2005

Nothing to chew on?

It isn't often that I sound off about absolutely nothing, so I do hope regular readers will forgive me. But I have to say that I cannot remember the last time that more words were uttered and more ink was spilled over a judicial nobody about whom no one -- not even the best legal minds in the country -- seems to know anything. This is no one's fault, of course, because other than a couple statements and a lecture, there's really nothing to know.

(By the way, I'm talking about Harriet Miers -- a woman whose headlines I went out of my way to praise yesterday because I liked their appearance.)

Even the charge of cronyism, true as it may be, will amount to very little in the long run. The Philadelphia Inquirer's Dick Polman, normally the Inquirer's inside line to Washington dirt, shows his frustration in knowing so little, and resorts to citing the blogosphere -- and history:

Conservatives are well aware that the cronyism issue is potent - they're raising it as well. Stephen Bainbridge, a conservative law professor who writes a blog, said yesterday: Miers "is a Bush crony, an unfortunate choice for an administration that has been fairly charged with excessive cronyism... . At this point, I see no reason - none, nada, zilch - for conservatives who care about the courts to lift a finger to support this candidate."

In fairness to Bush, he is hardly the first president to choose a friend without judicial experience for the high court. Franklin D. Roosevelt had a regular card game with William O. Douglas, his Wall Street watchdog, before putting him on the court.

Hey, do the math! (As the saying goes, "nothing from nothing leaves nothing.")

Polman, of course, is quite right about Douglas. The guy was a total crony, and he ended up being an unpredictable legendary wild man and a target of regular impeachment campaigns. The fact is, once Miers is on the court, she's there for life. Her cronyist "patron" will be out in three years (absent the much-predicted dictatorship he's supposed to establish -- in which case who'll need the Court?).

I rather enjoyed Polman's conclusion:

Meanwhile, virtually no one on the Democratic side is calling Miers an extremist. Quite the contrary. Here's Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid: "I like Harriet Miers. As White House counsel, she has worked with me in a courteous and professional manner. I am also impressed with the fact that she was a trailblazer for women," as a top Texas lawyer.

What better way for a Democrat to drive a wedge between Bush and conservatives than to praise his nominee? No wonder the right is nervous.

I think the left should be nervous too. They wanted a major fight. A showdown. The Supreme Court was a major campaign issue last year, and it galvanized ideologues on the left and the right. And now the much-predicted war has turned out to be a dud. Left wing and right wing ideologues are hardly in a position to battle it out with each other. Why, for once they can agree. They can fiercely and loudly object -- to nothing.

Ideologues or not, it's very tough to fight about nothing. Yeah, Ann Coulter (who manages to squeeze in an amusing comparison of gay marriage to Hitler's birthday) and Pat Buchanan are furious, but their words mean nothing to the masses in the middle.

Gay marriage and Hitler's birthday? I like that.

But seriously, let's return to nothing, OK?

Unless I am wrong, Miers is vaguely centrist (if even that is provable), with no judicial experience, who has said very little, but who has worked to earn Bush's trust. If history shows anything, it's that once she's on the court, she won't be a crony, and anything could happen.

In short, I know nothing, and I can predict nothing.

I still think yesterday's "pit bull" headline is, well, better than nothing.

But does anyone remember the plaid pants? Perhaps the political dirt diggers can break into Ms. Miers' closet, and analyze her clothing, and then we can all sink our teeth into something solid! Something like this, maybe?

...Suits hand-made by a tailor in Chicago in 1928. The tailor went out of business in 1933, then took his own life. ... shoes were hand-made in 1936. The cobbler has long since been dead. Underwear, all of the finest cloth, factory destroyed by fire in 1948.

In politics, digging comes before chewing.

UPDATE: Via Hugh Hewitt, I see that the ever-reliable MoveOn.org is summoning freelance dirt diggers:

Right now we urgently need more information, and we need your help to get it. In the next few hours the Internet will fill with facts, anecdotes and rumors about Harriet Miers. We need your help to sort through it all, select the relevant and important details, and let us know what you find—decentralized, grassroots research.

....

There are many important questions that need to be addressed, including:

What policies did she advocate for on the Dallas City Council?
What was her record at the head of the scandal-ridden Texas Lottery Commission?

(That'll shake up middle America.)

Zzzzz.....

MORE: Another Roosevelt crony was former Klansman Hugo Black:

The difficulty in predicting a nominee's performance is also well illustrated in more modern times by FDR's appointment of Alabama senator Hugo Black. Black was generally viewed as a Roosevelt crony. Black had enthusiastically supported Roosevelt's ill-fated efforts to pack the Court. Black had even once been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Although he had resigned a dozen years before his Supreme Court appointment, he still received an unsolicited membership card, and many people charged that his resignation was opportunistic; a leopard never changes his spots. But Black surprised his critics.

If the Senators had tried to predict how Black would rule on racial and free speech issues, they most certainly would have guessed wrong, and we would have been deprived of one of the greatest Justices in our nation's history.

Gee. You'd think it would be easier to predict the behavior of a crony who'd been a Klansman, than the behavior of a crony who'd been a, um, Lottery Commissioner.

Hey, wait a second! I don't want anyone to think I'm making a "moral equivalency" argument between the Lottery and the Klan. I'm not. They're at least as different as gay marriage and Hitler's birthday, OK?

(Hope my impatience doesn't show.....)

AFTERTHOUGHT: While it's nothing to get impatient over, how come Margaret Thatcher was called "Reagan's poodle," while Harriet Miers is being called Bush's "pit bull"?

Doggone it, I think that's speciesist and sexist! And maybe anti-Darwinist!

(What if this is Bush's way of saying "Fuck you!" to activists and intellectuals, while playing to the middle?)

MORE: WorldNetDaily explores Miers' suspicious past (including her past as a Democrat and even -- gasp! -- her "approving" Bush's "don't ask, don't tell" policy).

I'm not sure the "Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Democratic Party?" approach is all that helpful in predicting her future performance.

I mean, if being a former Klansman isn't an accurate predictor, why would being a former Democrat?

MORE: Via InstaPundit, I found a couple of additional links which Coco won't let me ignore.

Jonah Goldberg invokes the Carswell specter, and Roman Hruska's inane remarks (shouldn't that be Hroman?) in defense of mediocrity. I don't know whether Harriet Miers is in fact mediocre, but I know that mediocrity is not a pit bull trait. (Besides, aren't pit bulls more historically disadvantaged than mediocre humans?)

Jeff Goldstein, while neither calling Miers a mediocrity nor an anti-intellectual "outsider," cautions against outsider triumphalism:

pushing her as a “judicial outsider” is shortsighted; after all, we just got done hearing about all of John Roberts’ qualities, which proceeded from the very kind of background this current PR campaign seems to be offhandedly criticizing.

Yes, but Hillary Clinton opposed Roberts, and I see no way for her to now engage in the grandstanding she so badly wanted. (She appears annoyed, but hasn't said why....)

Regarding the ICC, Jeff said he'd "feel a lot better if I knew she didn’t support the ICC." I would too. Support for the ICC is the worst thing I've heard about Miers so far. (It's anything but pit bull-like.)

posted by Eric on 10.04.05 at 07:25 AM

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Comments

Homosexual marriage and Hitler's birthday? I'd rather celebrate homosexual marriage on Coulter's birthday! Her style.

I do get her analogy, though. Reminds me of a similar poll of unpopularity that the National Lampoon did shortly after 1980. The question was: Which would you prefer?: 1) a slow and painful death? 2) to be born without a face? 3) a Carter re-election? 49% chose #1, 49% chose #2, 2% chose #3. ha! ha! ha!

Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · October 4, 2005 02:03 PM

I'm going to have to reserve judgement on her as I did with Roberts at the beginning. I'm really at sea now, as the old salts say, as to the spectrumology of the Supreme Court.

Seeing my score on that last spectrum quiz, you would think I felt most strongly about economic issues, whereas it's still quite the reverse. Economic issues are secondary for me, it's the moral issues that are primary for me. The Supreme Court has always dealt primarily with the moral issues, fundamental questions of the individual vis-a-vis the state in areas like sexuality, religion, etc..

For most of my life, William O. Douglas was my ideal Justice, his defense of free speech and other rights, along with Hugo Black. Those were men called "liberal" in the John Stuart Mill sense. Later, Harry Blackmun's and John Paul Stevens's dissents in Bowers vs. Hardwick eloquently vindicated the individual's right to himself, and both Blackmun and Stevens had been appointed by Nixon and Ford, respectively.

On the other side, the "conservatives" such as Warren Earl Burger and William Rehnquist were for "law and order", authority. Then came Robert Bork, who explicitly and vociferously advocated practically zero individual rights, unlimited government power, in the name of unlimited majority rule. He was and is my ultimate worst nightmare for a Supreme Court Justice or even a traffic judge. Moral collectivists.

Fortunately, his views were noxious enough that he was withdrawn, and President Reagan then chose Anthony Kennedy. The apogee of all that was Justice Kennedy's decision in Lawrence & Garner vs. Texas, my dream come true, the fulfillment of what the Warren Court had begun with Griswold vs. Connecticut and Stanley vs. Georgia, finally booting government out of our bedrooms. I saw Justice Kennedy as a true Reagan conservative, consistently for individual rights and limited government, William O. Douglas without the New Deal baggage.

Unfortunately, the last three big decisions undercut that. McConnell vs. FCC, Raich vs. Ashcroft, Kelo vs. New London, all negated individual rights and expanded government power in the New Deal tradition. So, a "liberal" on the Supreme Court (even one appointed by Reagan!) is still no more than a New Dealer when it comes to property rights and federal government control over everything.

And, in those above-named three disasters, Clarence Thomas, a "conservative", dissented consistently on the side of individual rights and limited government. So, now I'm at a loss as to who is more on the side of the individual and who is more on the side of government. What we seem to have now are, on the one side, "broad constructionists" or "living Constitutionalists" who read both individual rights (at least in the sexual realm) and government powers (especially in the realm of economics) as broadly as possible, vs., on the other side, the "strict constructionists" or "originalists", who read both individual rights (especially in the sexual realm) and government powers (especially in the realm of economics) as narrowly as possible.

Hmmm....

Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · October 4, 2005 07:19 PM

Steven, you've touched on something which really bothers me, but which I have learned not to waste my time complaining about. (OK, so now I get to complain about it!)

As a libertarian, I have strong opinions about a lot of issues like a minimal role for government, hands off economic and social issues, etc. I have become quite accustomed to feeling frustrated that no libertarian -- say, Kozinksi, Reynolds, Volokh, or Barnett -- can or will ever be appointed to the Supreme Court. I've learned to settle -- for pragmatism, for less than perfection. I don't yell and scream because my wishes are not being fulfilled, and this is why I find it so hard to listen to the moral outrage of people who scream like mortally wounded animals because their idea of litmus test perfection hasn't been met.

I grit my teeth and listen to these people, and I always wonder what makes their opinions so infinitely worthier of consideration than mine.

Is it because I don't yell loudly enough? If so, it's hardly consoling.

Eric Scheie · October 4, 2005 09:26 PM