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Originally Posted by MoonDog
My GOD! The woman was Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy at the Bush White House!! Do you honestly believe that she was going to answer those questions with anything less than the "company line", regardless of what her personal views are?
Since you are dispensing predictions on the direction that the nominee would take on cases she hears, I would like to hear about your track record on other sitting Supreme Court Justices. How did you do when predicting the decisions supported by Reagan-nominee Justice Kennedy? Or how about Justice Souter, himself an appointee of the elder Bush president?
Both of these Justices were believed to be conservatives at the time of their nomination, but proved to be more liberal in actuality. But I guess you knew that at the times of their nominations and didn't worry about them at all.
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My point is that Miers is apparently very comfortable regurgitating whatever silly phrases that Rove places on her tongue. We can do better than this. An independent judiciary demands it.
My point in all of my post here is not to discredit Miers, it is to discredit what Bush has publicly pronounced about her. Bush's premise that she is the "best choice", is incredible. We observe the spectacle of one grossly incompetent executive appointing an equally incompetent justice.
I have a hunch that Miers is the best we can hope for from a Bush appointment, from the standpoint of eliciting protest from the extreme right, as well as the left. Bush '41 could not have predicted that Souter would end up being as neutral as time has revealed. I have no record of prediction, other than considering the source......the executive who makes the nomination decision. I feared the appointments of Reagan, and both Bushes, because they tend to represent a narrow base of wealthy, conservative, corporatists first, conservative Christians, second, and the rest of us a distant third.
I see why the right is "up in arms" over this, and I also agree with Hamilton...
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http://federalistpapers.com/federalist76.html
......But might not his nomination be overruled? I grant it might, yet this
could only be to make place for another nomination by himself. The
person ultimately appointed must be the object of his preference, though
perhaps not in the first degree........
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http://chronicle.com/free/2005/10/2005100602n.htm
Thursday, October 6, 2005
Supreme Court Nominee Helped Set Up Lecture Series That Brought Leading Feminists to Southern Methodist U.
By PETER SCHMIDT
For someone both heralded and feared as a potentially conservative voice on the U.S. Supreme Court, Harriet E. Miers has played a key role in exposing college students to some unmistakably liberal ideas.
In the late 1990s, as a member of the advisory board for Southern Methodist University's law school, Ms. Miers pushed for the creation of an endowed lecture series in women's studies named for Louise B. Raggio, one of the first women to rise to prominence in the Texas legal community.......
.......Ms. Miers,.......not only advocated for the lecture series, but also gave money and solicited donations to help get it off the ground.
A feminist icon, Gloria Steinem, delivered the series's first lecture, in 1998. In the following two years, the speakers were Patricia S. Schroeder, the former Democratic congresswoman widely associated with women's causes, and Susan Faludi, the author of Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991). Ann W. Richards, the Democrat whom George W. Bush unseated as governor of Texas in 1994, delivered the lecture in 2003.
Other speakers in the series have included Geraldine Laybourne, founder of Oxygen Media, a cable-television network for women; Gwen Ifill, moderator of public television's Washington Week and a correspondent for The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer; and Colleen Barrett and Herb Kelleher, both top executives at Dallas-based Southwest Airlines, who teamed up to give the lecture in 2004.
A description of the lecture series on Southern Methodist's Web site says it "brings role models of vision and achievement to SMU to speak on gender and women's issues."
The series "expands students' opportunities to hear and interact with nationally renowned speakers in the area of women's studies," the site says, "as well as strengthens intellectual ties between the university and the greater community."
Ms. Miers's work in setting up the lecture series is part of a pattern of deep involvement with Southern Methodist, where she received a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1967 and a law degree in 1970.
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