How Things Could Go Well

Nobody except perhaps the president and some of his associates really know how Harriet Miers would be as a justice.

THAT’S PART OF THE PROBLEM.

But since we don’t know, let’s consider how things could go well or ill based on how things unfold. In this post we’ll consider how they could go well.

• The pro-life movement is at a crucial juncture. Until this year there were three votes against The Evil Decision on the court (Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas). Overturning The Evil Decision is crucial to ending abortion in this country, even though getting it overturned will only be the BEGINNING of a huge, HUGE fight to end it.
• The question is how to get the extra two votes needed to overturn.
• So Bush used his first nomination to put Roberts on the court, Roberts presumably being a vote to overturn, but without a papertrail so that he couldn’t be effectively blocked by the pro-aborts in the Senate. That delayed having a huge nomination fight, which is good because you can only have so many huge nomination fights before the public gets tired of them and turns against you, starting to demand that you nominate someone who can get through more easily.
• I mean, the American public probably isn’t up for three Judicial Armageddons in a row, so if you can sneak an anti-Roe vote onto the Court without it triggering an Armageddon then that’s what you want to do.
• Originally, Roberts was meant to replace O’Connor (who was pro-Evil Decision), which would have presumably put us up at four votes to overturn.
• Unfortunately, because of Rehnquist’s untimely death, the expedient thing to do was slot Roberts in for Rehnquist, and that kept the vote tally at three to overturn (Scalia, Thomas, and presumptively Roberts). That’s okay. Rehnquist needed to be replaced with an anti-Evil Decision vote. That had to happen, anyway.
• So we’re back to replacing O’Connor. Again, the public can only take so many Armageddons, and the one that gives us the fifth vote gainst the Evil Decision will be the Mother Of All Armageddons, so why not save your capital for when you need it? If you can slip in another stealth anti-Evil Decision vote and avoid an Armageddon, so much the better.
• Thus you might pick your former personal attorney, who you may know or have strong reason to think will be willing to overturn, even if that isn’t visible to the public, and that would put four votes to overturn on the Court.
• You’re then in an optimal position, when the time comes, to put a fifth anti-Evil Decision vote on the Court. You haven’t spent all your capital on two prior Judicial Armageddons, so you’re in the best position you can be when going into the confirmation process for the fifth and crucial vote.

That’s how things COULD go well.

Unfortunately, this scenario is predicated on a number of things:

1. John Roberts is really a vote to overturn. (Probably, but not a certainty.)
2. Harriet Miers is really a vote to overturn. (I have no clue whatsoever at this point.)
3. Bush is really willing to put five votes to overturn on the Court and is capable of implementing a plan of this trickiness (I’m sure he or the folks around him could think of this; it’s willing to DO it that’s the quesiton, and I’m not confident that Bush is up for that.)

So I’m uncomfortable with the whole thing.

UP NEXT: How things could go ill.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live." View all posts by Jimmy Akin