The Discerning Texan
All that is necessary for evil to triumph, is for good men to do nothing.
-- Edmund Burke
-- Edmund Burke
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Steyn on Miers: "She's not ideal but she'll do"
Count Mark Steyn (and me) in with the "let's support Harriet" crowd. I think there is ample evidence there that Miers is no David Souter. Would I have picked someone else? Yes, I thought Janice Rogers Brown or Priscilla Owen deserved it, especially with what they had to put up with to get onto the Court of Appeals. But, as I have said before--I trust this President. And it is good to see someone I respect as much as Mark Steyn saying the same thing:
For what it's worth, my sense is that Harriet Miers will be, case by case, a more reliable vote against leftist judicial activism than her mercurial predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor. Why do I say this? Well, she's a strong supporter of the right to bear arms. The great Second Amendment expert Dave Kopel says you have to go back to Louis Brandeis 90 years ago to find a Supreme Court justice whose pre-nomination writings extol gun rights as fulsomely as Miers. According to an old boyfriend, Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, she packs heat -- a Smith & Wesson .45 -- which I can say with certainty the other lady justice, the far-left Ruth Bader Ginsburg, never has. She also's personally very opposed to abortion.
In other words, what seems to be emerging is a woman Bush responds to as a fellow cultural conservative and evangelical conservative (she's a born-again Christian), rather than as a judicial conservative -- a label Judge Bork dislikes, preferring quite correctly that we distinguish judges not as conservative or liberal but as either originalists or judicial activists. I find it hard to discuss Miers seriously in those terms, but on balance she seems likely to vote the right way for whatever reasons. She's thus another representative of Bush and Karl Rove's belief in incrementalism: that the Republican majority can be made a permanent feature of the landscape if you build it one small brick at a time. Miers is, at best, such a brick, at a time when conservatives were hoping Bush would drop a huge granite block on the court. But, given that she started out as a Democrat and has been on the receiving end of the partisan attacks on the administration for five years, she seems less likely than any detached effete legal scholar to be prone to the remorseless drift to the left that happens to Republican Supreme Court nominees.
For what it's worth, my sense is that Harriet Miers will be, case by case, a more reliable vote against leftist judicial activism than her mercurial predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor. Why do I say this? Well, she's a strong supporter of the right to bear arms. The great Second Amendment expert Dave Kopel says you have to go back to Louis Brandeis 90 years ago to find a Supreme Court justice whose pre-nomination writings extol gun rights as fulsomely as Miers. According to an old boyfriend, Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, she packs heat -- a Smith & Wesson .45 -- which I can say with certainty the other lady justice, the far-left Ruth Bader Ginsburg, never has. She also's personally very opposed to abortion.
In other words, what seems to be emerging is a woman Bush responds to as a fellow cultural conservative and evangelical conservative (she's a born-again Christian), rather than as a judicial conservative -- a label Judge Bork dislikes, preferring quite correctly that we distinguish judges not as conservative or liberal but as either originalists or judicial activists. I find it hard to discuss Miers seriously in those terms, but on balance she seems likely to vote the right way for whatever reasons. She's thus another representative of Bush and Karl Rove's belief in incrementalism: that the Republican majority can be made a permanent feature of the landscape if you build it one small brick at a time. Miers is, at best, such a brick, at a time when conservatives were hoping Bush would drop a huge granite block on the court. But, given that she started out as a Democrat and has been on the receiving end of the partisan attacks on the administration for five years, she seems less likely than any detached effete legal scholar to be prone to the remorseless drift to the left that happens to Republican Supreme Court nominees.
