[quote]Marmadogg wrote:
Is that the best you can do?
You are pathetic.
Come back to me when you can form a logical idea based in intellectual honesty.
[/quote]
That was what my previous post was essentially addressing… your intellectual dishonesty. But rather than try to have an actual debate where we follow premises to conclusions, and debate about the steps along the way, you choose to call me “pathetic.”
But you were never really interested in hearing what anyone else had to say about the issue, were you?
[quote]nephorm wrote:
Marmadogg wrote:
Is that the best you can do?
You are pathetic.
Come back to me when you can form a logical idea based in intellectual honesty.
That was what my previous post was essentially addressing… your intellectual dishonesty. But rather than try to have an actual debate where we follow premises to conclusions, and debate about the steps along the way, you choose to call me “pathetic.”
But you were never really interested in hearing what anyone else had to say about the issue, were you?
[/quote]
In your world conclusions and logical fallacies are one in the same.
That?s mental masturbation and there is only room for you on that solo expedition.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
That is actually the heart of the question.
Many pro-abortionists are anti-death penalty. This is intellectually dishonest. They are generally following the political herd.
The same goes with any in the right to life group that support the death penalty.
[/quote]
I disagree, as I’m right-to-life, & for the death penalty. The difference is those on death row have been tried & convicted (ie. they are not innocent), whereas a fetus is totally innocent.
[quote]reddog6376 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
That is actually the heart of the question.
Many pro-abortionists are anti-death penalty. This is intellectually dishonest. They are generally following the political herd.
The same goes with any in the right to life group that support the death penalty.
I disagree, as I’m right-to-life, & for the death penalty. The difference is those on death row have been tried & convicted (ie. they are not innocent), whereas a fetus is totally innocent.
[/quote]
In our society the death penalty only applies to those too poor or mentally incompetent to get a good attorney.
[quote]Zap Branigan wrote:
reddog6376 wrote:
Zap Branigan wrote:
That is actually the heart of the question.
Many pro-abortionists are anti-death penalty. This is intellectually dishonest. They are generally following the political herd.
The same goes with any in the right to life group that support the death penalty.
I disagree, as I’m right-to-life, & for the death penalty. The difference is those on death row have been tried & convicted (ie. they are not innocent), whereas a fetus is totally innocent.
In our society the death penalty only applies to those too poor or mentally incompetent to get a good attorney.
[/quote]
I’m sure there is far too much of that, and reforms are probably needed. However, I still support the idea of people guilty of heinous crimes being executed.
I agree. I was all for giving her the benefit of the doubt, and letting the confirmation hearings rat out her qualifications. But theis is getting embarassing.
Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it. Many of their justifications cannot be dignified as arguments. Of those that can be, some reveal a deficit of constitutional understanding commensurate with that which it is, unfortunately, reasonable to impute to Miers. Other arguments betray a gross misunderstanding of conservatism on the part of persons masquerading as its defenders.
Miers’s advocates, sensing the poverty of other possibilities, began by cynically calling her critics sexist snobs who disdain women with less than Ivy League degrees. Her advocates certainly know that her critics revere Margaret Thatcher almost as much as they revere the memory of the president who was educated at Eureka College.
Next, Miers’s advocates managed, remarkably, to organize injurious testimonials. Sensible people cringed when one of the former Texas Supreme Court justices summoned to the White House offered this reason for putting her on the nation’s highest tribunal: “I can vouch for her ability to analyze and to strategize.” Another said: “When we were on the lottery commission together, a lot of the problems that we had there were legal in nature. And she was just very, very insistent that we always get all the facts together.”
Miers’s advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.
In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers’s conservative detractors that she will reach the “right” results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives’ highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution’s meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.
As Miers’s confirmation hearings draw near, her advocates will make an argument that is always false but that they, especially, must make, considering the unusual nature of their nominee. The argument is that it is somehow inappropriate for senators to ask a nominee – a nominee for a lifetime position making unappealable decisions of enormous social impact – searching questions about specific Supreme Court decisions and the principles of constitutional law that these decisions have propelled into America’s present and future.
To that argument, the obvious and sufficient refutation is: Why, then, have hearings? What, then, remains of the Senate’s constitutional role in consenting to nominees?
It is not merely permissible, it is imperative that senators give Miers ample opportunity to refute skeptics by demonstrating her analytic powers and jurisprudential inclinations by discussing recent cases concerning, for example, the scope of federal power under the commerce clause, the compatibility of the First Amendment with campaign regulations and privacy – including Roe v. Wade .
Can Miers’s confirmation be blocked? It is easy to get a senatorial majority to take a stand in defense of this or that concrete interest, but it is surpassingly difficult to get a majority anywhere to rise in defense of mere excellence.
Still, Miers must begin with 22 Democratic votes against her. Surely no Democrat can retain a shred of self-respect if, having voted against John Roberts, he or she then declares Miers fit for the court. All Democrats who so declare will forfeit a right and an issue – their right to criticize the administration’s cronyism.
And Democrats, with their zest for gender politics, need this reminder: To give a woman a seat on a crowded bus because she is a woman is gallantry. To give a woman a seat on the Supreme Court because she is a woman is a dereliction of senatorial duty. It also is an affront to mature feminism, which may bridle at gallantry but should recoil from condescension.
As for Republicans, any who vote for Miers will thereafter be ineligible to argue that it is important to elect Republicans because they are conscientious conservers of the judicial branch’s invaluable dignity. Finally, any Republican senator who supinely acquiesces in President Bush’s reckless abuse of presidential discretion – or who does not recognize the Miers nomination as such – can never be considered presidential material.
Oh look. Someone thinks this might be cronyism. Seeing as how the author is in agreement with me on this issue, isn’t it imperative that you disagree with his conclusions?
Wait, is someone admitting that Bush has been recklessly abusing presidential discretion? Wow, how can that be. I thought Bush was exactly correct in all his actions, especially when appointing Brown as the head of FEMA?
–
This issue is wonderful. No matter which side you fall on, as a republican, you are supporting many democrat criticisms by assuming that stance. It’s great when issues come along which point out the fact that the emperor is in fact naked.
John Fund has been getting a lot of good leaks on this – which would seem to indicate that there are a lot of people inside the White House who are none too pleased with this nomination:
What Went Wrong
Lessons the White House should learn from the Miers debacle.
Monday, October 24, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT
President Bush has returned from a weekend in Camp David, where much of the discussion centered on the beleaguered nomination of Harriet Miers. While the president is determined to press forward, the prognosis he received was grim. Her visits with senators have gone poorly. Her written answers to questions from the Senate were sent back as if they were incomplete homework. The nominee herself has stumbled frequently in the tutorials in which government lawyers are grilling her in preparation for her Nov. 7 hearings.
The president trusts his instincts, and they are usually right. But when they fail him, the result can be calamitous. Take last December’s nomination of Bernard Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security. After several scandals involving his time as head of New York City’s police quickly surfaced, it was then learned he had employed an illegal alien as a nanny and failed to submit required Social Security payments. After only a week, Mr. Bush quietly allowed Mr. Kerik to withdraw his name.
Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, even suggested to ABC News that Mr. Bush had merely “intended” to nominate Mr. Kerik and insisted that “many of the questions that have been raised in the media were well understood by the White House when they considered Bernie Kerik.” He wouldn’t elaborate on which ones, leading many reporters to conclude the White House was more intent on spinning the story than learning lessons from the botched pick. The president reinforced that impression during a post-Kerik news conference, when he insisted, “I’ve got great confidence in our vetting process. And so the lessons learned is continue to vet and ask good questions and get these candidates, the prospective nominees, to understand what we expect a candidate will face during a background check, FBI background check as well as congressional hearings.”
The botched handling of the Kerik nomination was a precursor of much that has gone wrong with the Miers nomination. This time, the normal vetting process broke down, with Mr. Card ordering William Kelley, Ms. Miers’s own deputy, to conduct the background checks–a clear conflict of interest. Even Newt Gingrich, a supporter of Ms. Miers’s nomination, says that “the president believes in her so deeply, he is so convinced she’s the right person, that I don’t think it ever occurred to him to go through the kind of normal opposition research and normal vetting.”
The big difference between the Kerik nomination and the Miers nomination is that Mr. Bush has a long history with Ms. Miers and he is still bravely fighting for her after three weeks of brutal criticism. But Ms. Miers has not been well-served by Bush supporters who have engaged in increasingly strained arguments to overcome the skepticism about her. Three approaches in particular have alienated many people who are vital to Ms. Miers’ confirmation:
Intimidation and arm-twisting. Many longtime supporters of President Bush have been startled to get phone calls from allies of the president strongly implying that a failure to support Ms. Miers will be unhealthy to their political future. “The message in Texas is, if you aren’t for this nominee, you are against the president,” one conservative leader in that state told me. The pressure has led to more resentment than results.
Similar pressure has been applied in New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first presidential primary in 2008. Newsweek has reported that “when George W. Bush’s political team wanted to send ambitious Republican senators a firm message about Harriet Miers (crude summary: ‘Lay off her if you ever want our help’),” they chose loyal Bush ally and former state attorney general Tom Rath to deliver it. Plans were even launched to confront Virginia’s Sen. George Allen, a likely 2008 candidate for president, and demand he sign a pro-Miers pledge. Luckily, the local Bush forces were warned off such a move at the last minute.
Mr. Rath didn’t return my calls, and local sources say he is laying low now that reporters have uncovered his key role in pushing the nomination of David Souter in 1990. “It was Rath and [then-Sen. Warren] Rudman who convinced [then White House chief of staff] John Sununu to back Souter,” recalls Gordon Humphrey, a former U.S. senator from the Granite State who at the time supported Judge Souter as a member of the Judiciary Committee. The profound disappointment conservatives experienced when Justice Souter, another stealth nominee, veered left is a major reason for the resistance to Harriet Miers.
Another reason for conservative suspicion is that it was Mr. Card, a former moderate Massachusetts state legislator, who pushed the Miers choice. “This is something that Andy and the president cooked up,” a White House adviser told Time magazine. “Andy knew it would appeal to the president because he loves appointing his own people and being supersecret and stealthy about it.” Conservatives still recall that in the White House of the first President Bush, Mr. Card was deputy chief of staff to Mr. Sununu, the prime backer of Judge Souter. Mr. Card told me on Friday that “it would be a complete exaggeration to say I played a role in the Souter selection. I merely supported his nomination as I did all presidential appointments.”
Ed Rollins, the GOP consultant who at the time headed the House Republican Campaign Committee and who was Mr. Card’s boss in the Reagan White House, remembers it differently. “Of course Andy played a role,” he told me. “He was Sununu’s top aide.” Two other aides who served with Mr. Card in the White House told me he was an enthusiastic backer of the Souter selection. “Now that he’s brought us Miers we worry that 15 years later Andy is playing the role of a Serial Souterizer,” one said.
Rewriting the history of Ms. Miers’s selection. After political pushback by conservatives became clear, the White House apparently engaged in spurious spin to explain the logic of the selection. Dr. James Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, says he was told by White House aide Karl Rove that other female candidates had withdrawn from consideration because “the process had become so vicious and so vitriolic and so bitter that they didn’t want to subject themselves or their families to it.” White House aides have told others the same story, but will mention names only privately. Many now feel they were misled.
After making several calls to White House and Senate staffers as well as conservative activists who unofficially advised the White House, I have grave doubts about the White House storyline, as do others. One potential nominee did want the White House to know she had some family problems that could bear on the selection process but she did not withdraw her name. Three whose names the White House has privately mentioned as having dropped out say they are angry at any suggestion they did.
What is clear is that the same White House that says it won’t listen to senators who tell them the Miers nomination should be withdrawn was highly solicitous of Senate objections to other qualified nominees. One federal judge was nixed by a powerful senator over a judicial opinion that would have been attacked by feminists. Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, both of whom won tough confirmation battles for seats on appellate courts only this spring, were nixed by other GOP Senators as too tough a battle for the high court. Alice Batchelder of the Sixth Circuit was deep-sixed by an old Ohio political rival, Republican National Committee co-chairman Jo Ann Davidson. The White House and some senators deemed Edith Jones of the Fifth Circuit too difficult to confirm. Given Mr. Bush’s id?e fixe that the nominee had to be a woman, it’s possible the White House allowed itself to be pushed into a corner in which Ms. Miers was literally the only female left.
A totally failed White House effort to explain and build support for the nomination. Assuming Ms. Miers was the only potential nominee the White House inner circle could agree on, it is remarkable how poor a job they have done in providing even the most basic information about her. Ms. Miers herself had to make an emergency trip to Dallas to recover basic documents that would normally have been submitted during a vetting process.
Ms. Miers has never published anything of note other than vanilla op-ed pieces, and her memos to President Bush are protected by executive privilege. In trying to find clues as to her judicial philosophy, I have called all over Texas and Washington in search of people she might have talked with about that topic. No luck. In fact, it became clear Ms. Miers is a complete mystery. “We spent about 1,200 hours together and had in excess of 6,000 agenda items, and I never knew where Harriet was going to be on any of those items until she cast her vote,” Jim Buerger, a former Miers colleague on the Dallas City Council, told the Washington Post. “I wouldn’t consider her a liberal, a moderate or a conservative, and I can’t honestly think of any cause she championed.”
I then tried the White House and the Republican National Committee and gave them a simple request. “Can you give me the name of anyone who has ever had a serious conversation about politics or judicial philosophy with Ms. Miers? Leave aside her good friend Nathan Hecht or someone on the White House payroll. I don’t even have to know what the conversation consisted of, just be satisfied that they had one.” I never received any names.
I called Justice Hecht, her longtime friend of 30 years, who now sits on the Texas Supreme Court. The gracious Justice Hecht, who has testified to Ms. Miers’s character, told me she is a strict constructionist in judicial philosophy and is “pro-life” in her personal views. When I asked him if there was anyone else he knew who had ever spoken with Ms. Miers about politics or judicial philosophy, he hesitated. After some effort he came up with one name. After more prodding he gave me another name, someone he said would be of “limited help.” I thanked him and called up his two suggested sources. One didn’t return my call. The other, former Texas Supreme Court justice Tom Phillips, recalled one conversation about how Ms. Miers could “get out the vote” in her race for City Council. He was otherwise stumped.
So my hunt went on. In desperation, I took to going on radio talk shows in Texas and tongue-in-cheek offered to practice “checkbook journalism” for the first time in my career. I said I would write a small check to the favorite charity of anyone who contacted me and could plausibly say that he has had a serious discussion about politics or judicial philosophy with Ms. Miers. So far it hasn’t cost me a dime. For my trouble, I have been incorrectly attacked by allies of Ms. Miers, including some in the White House, for supposedly waving a checkbook seeking negative information about her. For the record, I made my offer in a jocular fashion, but to make a serious point. With the exception of President Bush, no one appears to know the nominee’s judicial philosophy.
I believe it is almost inevitable that Ms. Miers will withdraw or be defeated. Should that happen, it is important President Bush understand how it really happened. While he acted out of sincerity, the nomination was quickly perceived by many as merely a means to a desired end: getting another vote for his views on the court. While some conservatives backed her because they honestly believed she would rule independently with an understanding of the limited role of judges envisioned by the Founders, that message was drowned out by accusations of cronyism and mediocrity.
The president also was let down by seven senators in his own party who in May agreed to scuttle plans to end judicial filibusters blocking nominees from ever getting a vote. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable for him to think the Senate wasn’t in a position to confirm a nominee with a long paper trail.
But he may soon have a chance for a fresh start and no choice but to have a fight over substance. When Douglas Ginsburg asked to have his nomination to the Supreme Court pulled in 1987 after allegations he had used marijuana, Ronald Reagan won unanimous confirmation in a Democratic Senate for Anthony Kennedy, then a judge with a decade-long conservative track record on a federal appellate court. Similarly, Mr. Bush recovered quickly from losing Linda Chavez as his nominee for Labor Secretary and Mr. Kerik as Secretary of Homeland Security. The damage to his relations with his conservative base would blow over quickly if Mr. Bush were to quickly name a well-qualified nominee who was not a sphinx when it came to judicial philosophy. Perhaps this time he might even expand the talent pool to include–gasp–men.
This column seems to have presciently predicted what is going to happen – both sides of the aisle are going to demand docs the administration won’t release, and the nomination will die quietly.
October 21, 2005
An Exit Strategy for the Miers Debacle
By Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON – It’s no secret that I think the Harriet Miers nomination was a mistake. Nonetheless, when asked how she will do in the hearings, my answer is, I hope she does well. I have no desire to see her humiliated. Nor would I take any joy in seeing her rejected, though I continue to believe it would be best for the country that she not be confirmed for the Supreme Court.
And while I remain as exercised as anyone by the lack of wisdom of this choice, I part company from those who see the Miers nomination as a betrayal of conservative principles. The idea that Bush is looking to appoint some kind of closet liberal David Souter or even some rudderless Sandra Day O’Connor clone is wildly off the mark. The president’s mistake was thinking he could sneak a reliable conservative past the liberal litmus tests (on abortion, above all) by nominating a candidate at once exceptionally obscure and yet exceptionally well known to him.
The problem is that this strategy blew up in his face. Her obscurity is the result of her lack of constitutional history, which, in turn, robs her of the minimum qualifications for service on the Supreme Court. And while, post-Bork, stealth seems to be the most precious asset a conservative Supreme Court nominee can have, how stealthy is a candidate who has come out publicly for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion?
So, imagine the hearings. At first she will have to pass an implicit competency test. As case upon case is thrown at her on national television, she dare not respond, as she apparently did to Sen. Chuck Schumer while making the rounds, that she will have to ``bone up on this a little more.‘’ Then there will be the withering fire of conservatives such as Sen. Sam Brownback who will try to establish some grounds to believe that (a) she has a judicial philosophy, and (b) it is conservative.
And then there will be the Democrats who, in their first act of political wisdom in this millennium, have held their fire on Miers, under the old political axiom that when your opponent is committing suicide, you get out of the way. But now that Miers is so exposed on abortion, the Democrats will be poised like a reserve cavalry to come over the hills to attack her from the left – assuming she has survived the attack from the right.
The pre-hearing omens are not good. When the chairman and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee express bipartisan exasperation, annoyance and almost indignation at her answers to the committee’s simple questionnaire, she’s got trouble. This after she confused Chairman Specter about her position on Griswold, the second most famous ``right to privacy’’ case ever, and seemed confused when answering ranking Democrat Leahy’s question about her favorite justice.
But it gets worse. There’s the off-stage stuff. John Fund reports that in a conference call of conservative leaders, two confidantes of Miers explicitly said that she would overturn Roe. The subsequent denials by one of these judges that he ever said that, and the subsequent affirmation by two of the people who had heard the call that in fact he did say so, create the nightmare scenario of subpoenaed witnesses contradicting each other under oath over Miers.
We need an exit strategy from this debacle. I have it.
Lindsey Graham has been a staunch and public supporter of this nominee. Yet on Wednesday he joined Brownback in demanding privileged documents from Miers’ White House tenure.
Finally, light at the end of this tunnel. A way out: irreconcilable differences over documents.
For a nominee who, unlike John Roberts, has practically no previous record on constitutional issues, such documentation is essential for the Senate to judge her thinking and legal acumen. But there is no way that any president would release this kind of information – policy documents'' and legal analysis’’ – from such a close confidante. It would forever undermine the ability of any president to get unguarded advice.
Which creates a classic conflict, not of personality, not of competence, not of ideology, but of simple constitutional prerogatives: The Senate cannot confirm her unless it has this information. And the White House cannot allow release of this information lest it jeopardize executive privilege.
Hence the perfectly honorable way to solve the conundrum: Miers withdraws out of respect for both the Senate and the executive’s prerogatives, the Senate expresses appreciation for this gracious acknowledgment of its needs and responsibilities, and the White House accepts her decision with the deepest regret and with gratitude for Miers’ putting preservation of executive prerogative above personal ambition.
[quote]Marmadogg wrote:
I thought there was no ‘litmus test’?
I guess we all know that is bullshit now.
Nominating Miers is like nominating Bush’s personal accountant to chair the Fed.
Bush has been doing this shit for 5 years.
Why did it take everyone so long to wake the F up?
One word explanation:
Freeptards[/quote]
BTW, that has to be one of the stupidest words ever invented on the Democratic Underground… I thought perhaps it was a typo or that you were drooling on your keyboard, but I managed to find that same word used over and over again on the Democratic Underground.