Jimmy Akin

EXERPTS:

A day after Bush publicly beseeched skeptical supporters to trust his judgment on Miers, a succession of prominent conservative leaders told his representatives that they did not. Over the course of several hours of sometimes testy exchanges, the dissenters complained that Miers was an unknown quantity with a thin résumé and that her selection — Bush called her "the best person I could find" — was a betrayal of years of struggle to move the court to the right.

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers "has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back. Gillespie later said he did not mean to accuse anyone in the room but "was talking more broadly" about criticism of Miers.

[NOTE FROM JIMMY: The charge of sexism is INSANE. If the president had nominated a KNOWN ORIGINALIST who happened to be a woman there would be ZERO complaints. Gillespie DESERVED to be shouted down for such an insult.]

The tenor of the two meetings suggested that Bush has yet to rally his own party behind Miers and underscores that he risks the biggest rupture with the Republican base of his presidency. While conservatives at times have assailed some Bush policy decisions, rarely have they been so openly distrustful of the president himself.

The 90-minute Norquist session where Gillespie appeared before 100 activists was the more fiery encounter, according to participants. Among those speaking out was Jessica Echard, executive director of the Eagle Forum, founded by Phyllis Schlafly. While she declined to give a full account later because of the meeting ground rules, Echard said in an interview that her group could not for now support Miers: "We feel this is a disappointment in President Bush. If it’s going to be a woman, we expected an equal heavyweight to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her liberal stance, and we did not get that in Miss Miers."

Another conservative captured the mood, according to a witness, by scorning Miers. "She’s the president’s nominee," he said. "She’s not ours."

At Weyrich’s two-hour luncheon featuring Mehlman and Goeglein addressing 85 activists, the host opened the discussion by rejecting Bush’s call to trust him. "I told Mehlman that I had had five ‘trust-mes’ in my long history here . . . and I said, ‘I’m sorry but the president saying he knows her heart is insufficient," Weyrich said, referring to Republican court appointments that resulted in disappointment for conservatives.

GET THE STORY.

Earlier today I looked at how things might go well and how they might go ill with the Harriet Miers nomination.

Now here’s what I want to happen. . . .

It depends.

IF Harriet Miers (a) is willing to overturn The Evil Decision and (b) willing to vote that there is NOT a right to homosexual marriage in the Constitution THEN I want her to be confirmed.

I’m not happy about the situation, but that’s what I want to happen.

On the other hand,

IF Harriet Miers fails to meet conditions (a) AND (b) THEN I want her not to be confirmed. That can happen two ways:

1) Things get so bad that the Senate refuses to confirm her.

2) Things get so bad that Bush withdraws her nomination.

I don’t care which.

I wish that I could be more concrete about what I want, but in the absence of knowing where Miers is with respect to (a) and (b), I can’t. I can only offer a conditional expression of my desires.

I’m hacked about being in such a situation, and–frankly–I find it ABSURD.

This "Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy on abortion that recent Republican presidents have been following with respect to Supreme Court nominees is absurd. Democrats don’t follow that when they’re in office, and as a result, they get the kinds of justices they want (Breyer, Ginsburgh).

By contrast, look at the Lame-Os and outright Evilfolk that Republican presidents have stuck us with:

• Warren Burger (original vote FOR the Evil Decision)
• Harry Blackmun (AUTHOR of the Evil Decision)
• Lewis Powell (original vote FOR the Evil Decision)
• John Paul Stevens (voted to uphold the Evil Decision)
• Sandra Day O’Connor (voted to uphold the Evil Decision)
• Anthony Kennedy (voted to uphold the Evil Decision)
• David Souter (voted to uphold the Evil Decision)

Now compare this list to the GOOD (or semi-good) justices that have been nominated by Republican presidents in the same timeframe:

• William Renhquist (original vote AGAINST the Evil Decision)
• Antonin Scalia (voted to overturn the Evil Decision)
• Clarence Thomas (voted to overturn the Evil Decision)

So it’s 7 to 3.

That’s a DIRT POOR batting average, fellas.

And in recent cases, it’s faciliated by the "Don’t ask, don’t tell" policy.

Overall, it’s been facilitated by Republican presidents not INSISTING that only originalists be put on the bench.

Some allowance can be made for the fact that, thirty years ago there was no Federalist Society and no organized originalist movement, but that’s still a DIRT POOR record, and there is no reason for it to continue today.

Not when there are tons of good originalists out there to pick from.

Not when Republicans have 55 seats in the Senate.

The president is playing with fire.

These nominations are WHY he won both of his elections. If pro-lifers were taken out of the equation, he would have been defeated both times. These nominations are THE THING he was sent to Washington to do, and at the moment he’s giving every appearance of fouling them up.

This is NOT inspiring to his base, and his presidency will founder if ANY of them go the wrong way. His base will simply desert him and he will be unable to accomplish anything in the remainder of his second term, with even more notably diminished capacity to do anything after the punitive 2006 elections take their toll on the Republican Party.

Unless Bush is playing the "How things could go well" scenario and has secret, insider information that BOTH Roberts AND Miers meet conditions (a) AND (b) then this stealth candidate strategy is not only DANGEROUS and UNNECESSARY, it’s also utterly PUSILLANIMOUS.

BUT ON THIS ISSUE THE MAN IS RIGHT.

In an advance copy of his new column that is making its way around the blogosphere (found above on Southern Appeal, which is a hotspot of Miers analysis), Will tears into the Miers nomination.

EXCERPTS:

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules.

First, it is not important that she be confirmed.

Second, it might be very important that she not be.

Third, the presumption — perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting — should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential deference to which senatorial discretion is due.

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court’s tasks. The president’s ‘‘argument’’ for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons. . . .

READ THE WHOLE, MUST-READ THING.

Earlier I looked at how things could go well based on the Harriet Miers nomination. Now let’s look at how they could go ill:

• Harriet Miers gets confirmed by the Senate and goes onto the Court.
• Sometime before November 2006 it emerges that she OR Roberts OR both are not really anti-Evil Decision after all. (This could happen even before her confirmation.)
• Bush is exposed as having FOOLISHLY put pro-Evil justices on the court.
• Pro-lifers are so disgusted, dismayed, BETRAYED, and ANGRY that they STAY HOME on Election Day.
• Pro-Evil people win more seats in the House and Senate, possibly even enough to change which party controls one or both of the houses.
• Or at least there are enough new pro-Evil senators elected that, combined with the weak-kneed and outright pro-Evil Republicans in the Senate (e.g., Arlen Spectre inter alia) that even when a third and possibly a fourth slot opens on the Court, it is not practical to get anti-Evil justices appointed and, in any case, we will be unable to get the needed five votes for the foreseeable future.
• MILLIONS MORE CHILDREN THEREFORE DIE AS THE ABORTION HOLOCAUST IS EXTENDED THROUGH THE PRESIDENT’S FOOLISH ACTIONS.
• The resulting debacle becomes the Exemplar Par Exellence that the OSTENSIBLY pro-life party WILL NOT DELIVER THE GOODS WHEN IT HAS THE CHANCE and results in a permanent alienation of the pro-life movement from that party.
• Unfortunately, the party that is NOT ostensibly pro-life does not suddenly become pro-life either (it already having embraced abortion as a sacrament), leading to pro-lifers having no major party to support that will further their goals.
• This leads to many pro-lifers simply checking out of the political process altogether, refusing to vote for anybody. They thus fail to do the good with their votes that they could do if they weren’t so bitter and demoralized.
• Various attempts are made at forming or envigorating third parties that WILL be pro-life, but that’s a process that will take a generation AT BEST to achieve results, meaning that
• MILLIONS UPON MILLIONS OF MORE CHILDREN DIE.

That’s how things could go badly.

Problem is: This scenario at the moment seems AT LEAST as likely and possibly MORE LIKELY to me than the "How things could go well" scenario.

I don’t think that the president and his advisors realize just how THIN THE ICE IS THAT THEY’VE BEEN SKATING ON.

There is NO ROOM for a pro-Evil justice getting onto the Court at this point. If EITHER Roberts OR Miers OR Nominee #3 turns out to be pro-Evil, the "How things could go ill" scenario begins to unfold, and once it starts unfolding, it may well be unstoppable.

Given the "I don’t have a litmus-test on abortion" hogwash that has been talked up of late, the odds are not at all unreasonable that one or more of these nominees will turn out to be pro-Evil. When the people in the White House (and the nominees) tell us that they AREN’T ASKING the abortion question, I have to take them at their word.

Now, I don’t care a flip about political parties. But I do care about babies DYING, and the prospects that may unfold in the wake of the current Supreme Court nominations could lead to an awful, AWFUL lot of babies dying.

"Trust us" is the message that is coming out of the White House.

I’m sorry, but I’m just not in a trusting mood at present.

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.

Y’all might wanna give me a call for one of your presidential job approval polls.

In the wake of the Miers nomination, my personal presidential job approval has flipped from being a "hold your nose," barely-ranked-in-one-category to being markedly in the other, at least for the moment.

I suspect the same is true of a lot of other people.

Be sure to call them, too.

More on all this as the day progresses.