First Monday in October
Bush has appointed a new Chief Justice for the SCOTUS (that’s Supreme Court for all you people not on the “inside”) and has just announced his nominee for the second vacant slot. Now, I had a fairly decent column all written up about Alberto Gonzales, the G.W. Bush Part Deux Administration’s Attorney General, because Bush has been making cow eyes at Gonzales as a prospective Supreme Court Justice practically since he hired him to take that lunatic John Ashcroft’s place. Gonzales has a track record that makes for good op-ed fodder. Among other things, he advised Bush, Rummy and crew on how to avoid culpability for torture techniques during interrogation of terror suspects and sent a record number of people to death row in Texas with recommendations he made to Bush as his legal counsel during Bush’s governorship.
But alas, it wasn’t to be and we’re left with Harriet Miers, a longtime friend of Bush’s and, prior to serving as his Washington legal counsel, a partner in a powerful 400 attorney Dallas corporate law firm. Ms. Miers is a remarkable choice for this nomination for many reasons, chief among them, of course, is that she has never served as a judge anywhere before. Yes, Bush’s choice for a pivotal Supreme Court seat has never sat on a bench - not at the Federal level, not at the state level, and not at so much as a Biggest Pumpkin contest at the Texas State fair. It was difficult to keep a straight face while listening to Bush’s efforts to pad out her sparse, ghostly paper trail: "She’s given generously of her time at a number of charities," he offered awkwardly. He then went on to kill a couple of minutes by listing them all. I don’t know if he referred to the YWCA by its full name, the Young Women’s Christian Association, in an effort to fill up an extra five seconds of his speech or to curry the favor of the Christian Far Right. If it was the latter, it, along with the rest of his speech, didn’t do any good. The Right began bitching about Miers before Bush’s filler-heavy announcement was even finished. They wanted a heavyweight conservative, and while not enough is known about Miers to definitively say that she doesn’t fit that bill, they still weren’t happy. After all, they’d been explicitly promised a far right Christian during Bush’s reelection campaign.
Meanwhile, lefties on the Judiciary Committee were none too impressed either, especially after it came to light that Miers’ law firm had been forced to settle a $22 million class action suit after aiding a client in defrauding investors – under her direct leadership.
Without any written opinions to analyze, she’s a blank that makes both sides of the aisle, elephant and donkey alike, nervous. This may even be a deliberate move on Bush’s part. It’s always likely that this nominee was chosen strictly for how little can be found out about her stands on key issues, much as Justice Souter under O.G. Bush I.
On the surface it does indeed appear that this is an effort on Bush’s part to avoid controversy and put an ass in the seat with as little blood drawn as possible. But Bush has seldom made an appointment that wasn’t blatant cronyism – his own, his dad’s or Cheney’s - so ultimately one thing that comes as no surprise whatsoever about Miers is that she’s a close bud of one member of that triumvirate from hell, George Bush himself. And she’ll make fiscal conservatives happy because she’s a demonstrable friend of big business.
But hell, can you feel me straining to come up with anything real about this nominee? And here I had the nerve to ridicule Bush for padding out his nomination announcement. Look, this lawyer may prove to be a right-wing nut job or cold-blooded corporate shrill but I doubt either scenario will be an entirely fair assessment. In all likelihood, she will probably prove to be very similar to her direct predecessor; Bush seems to lack the imagination for anything else. The lesson of the contentious nomination of Clarence Thomas seems to have sunk in with both Bushes, who have been playing it safe since that lurid fiasco. (I personally blame Thomas, along with Internet porn, for the prevailing draconian preference for Brazilian bikini waxes.) It’s a safe bet that there’s nothing about short and curlies on soft drink cans in Miers’ background.
Which is too bad. It could certainly have made this whole thing a little more entertaining.
ADDENDUM update on a column I wrote over the summer: NYT reporter Judith Miller, who spent months in jail for refusing to divulge her source in the Plame spy-outing scandal starring Karl Rove, has finally talked. Rove faces a grand jury on the matter next week, even though the official source was revealed to be Cheney’s chief-of-staff, Lewis Libby. We’ll see what happens.
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