The Harriet Miers Nomination

Now who exactly is Harriet Miers and where did she come from? How come that President Bush chose her and not any other more qualified and more conservative candidate to fill in Sandra Day O’Connors place on the bench? Doesn’t he realize that he will face some opposition even from the far right oriented Congress Republicans
as he proceeds with the nomination? Why would he choose someone ho has only limited experience with commercial litigation, no experience with constitutional law whatsoever, and has never even been a judge before? Is he thinking at all??? Unfortunately, he is…at least this time. The key in this whole scheme is to find a candidate he knows but public does not, a candidate with limited public record so that nothing can be said about them, and above all the candidate of president’s utmost trust. What President Bush is doing is mimicking chess player who moves figures across the board, in what their opponents perceive as random patterns, while only the player himself knows that those are well plotted moves that will lead to the desired outcome.

My suspicion is that President Bush is introducing an ultra conservative judge whose conservative agenda and possibly even intention to legislate from the bench will be hard to detect during the congressional hearings. Democrats are about to walk in an ambush and they are not even aware of it. Harriet Miers will likely be nominated, certainly with less fuss than what we have witnessed with Justice Scalia and some other Supreme Court candidates proposed by the Bush administration. After the New Orleans organizational disaster, with the numbers of soldiers killed in Iraq going over two thousand, and with his approval rating on it’s all time low, Bush doesn’t need another loud quarrel with the democrats. Events like that only tend to further degrade the presidential reputation.

What democrats seem to be doing at this point is playing along with the administration, and it seems that Miers will be in Washington pretty soon. It might be that they are just comfortable with the candidate that once gave money for the Gore campaign and who is opposed by the ultraconservatives within the Republican Party because she is not “conservative enough”. Hey, there must be something good about this lady if she gave money to the democrat and if the “other” guys don’t like her – democrats seem to be saying.

However, Bush and Miers know each other for a while. She has in the white house since 2004, and worked for Bush family for many years before that. He knows that he can trust her, and he knows that this born again Christian has changed her mind about many issues since the time she gave money to Gore and the Democratic National Committee Services Corp. in 1988. Otherwise she wouldn’t be working with him. He knows of it, but we do not. Why would Bush, who has only hard core conservatives in his administration, give a job in a white house to a moderate and non-partisan lawyer? He wouldn’t!

While I realize that Congress is entirely Republican dominated I still think that Democrats need to wake up and do everything possible to prevent Miers form getting a placement among the Supreme Court Justices. For once allying with the ultraconservative republicans in order to reject nomination might be the right choice. Otherwise we will be buying a wrapped up surprise present from President Bush; a present that may cost us a lot in the long run. Do we want to do that? I do not trust the person that he would trust-too many civil liberties are at stake.

By Damir Tokic
Communications Law Student