Fight Brewing? And Welcome To My World

Stories like this may mean Miers has to speak pretty openly about Roe in her hearings, so maybe we'll get our"fight" over the judiciary after all. UPDATE: Richard Reeb has a pretty funny take on the linked article & Conservatives being "shocked, shocked" to find politics playing a role in SCOTUS appts.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, Melanie Kirkpatrick expressed my view exactly: I don't know Harriet, but I do know Bush, and here's his record:

Mr. Bush was elected in part on his pledge to remake the federal judiciary, and he's demonstrably followed through on that promise. That includes the appointment of John Roberts as chief justice of the United States, 43 appointees to the appeals courts and nearly 200 judges on the federal district courts. There are 871 judges in the federal judiciary, including 50 current vacancies. By the end of his second term, Mr. Bush will have appointed one-third or more. [Does no one understand what a terrific accomplishment that is? --ed.] Ms. Miers has served on the committee that advises the president on judicial picks and, as White House counsel, has been chairman of that committee for the past year.

This reshaping of the judiciary hasn't been easy, and Mr. Bush has had to fight to keep his word. During his first two years in office, a Democratic-controlled Senate refused to act on 47% of his appeals-court nominees, or 15 out of 32 names. He renominated them on Jan. 7, 2003, immediately after the new, GOP-controlled, Senate was seated.

The Democrats' next tactic was the filibuster. No Senate had ever filibustered a president's appeals-court choice before, but 10 of Mr. Bush's best-qualified nominees met that fate in the last Congress. They included three women, an African-American, an Hispanic and an Arab-American. All had enough bipartisan support to be confirmed but were denied a vote by a liberal minority of Senators. Mr. Bush didn't back down on his nominees. He gave recess appointments to two-Charles Pickering [who's publicly supporting Miers by the by --ed.]of the Fifth Circuit and William Pryor of the 11th--who had been subjected to particularly vicious smears by Democrats. Judge Pickering had been accused of harboring racist views, even though he had the support of many African-Americans in his home state of Mississippi. Judge Pryor, Alabama's attorney general, was skewered for his traditional Catholic beliefs even though he had pledged to uphold Roe v. Wade. Mr. Bush's recess appointments came against the advice of some who favored compromise with the Democrats.

His highest-profile pick was Miguel Estrada, a Honduran immigrant who is often classed with Mr. Roberts as one of the brightest lawyers of his generation. After 28 months of waiting for a vote--and seven attempts in the Senate to break his filibuster--Mr. Estrada decided to withdraw and get on with his life. The White House had been prepared to keep on fighting. [Do you think Bush doesn't know whether Miers advised him to fight for these judges or to compromise with Harry Reid & Chuck Schumer? Do you think after three years of this process he doesn't know exactly what she thinks on all the vital issues facing the Court?--ed.]

Mr. Bush understood the political stakes here, and put Democrats' obstruction of his judicial nominees at the front and center of last year's re-election campaign. When he was rewarded with re-election, one of the first acts of his second term was to renominate every filibustered nominee who wished to carry on the fight. As a result, Priscilla Owen and Janice Rogers Brown, among others, were finally seated on the appeals bench this spring. Judge Owen had been waiting for four years; Judge Brown's nomination had languished for two. They were confirmed as the result of a deal under which 14 senators--seven Democrats and seven Republicans-agreed not to filibuster except under vaguely defined "extraordinary circumstances." Conservatives angry that Mr. Bush didn't nominate Michael Luttig or Edith Jones or Sam Alito to the Supreme Court ought to direct at least part of their ire toward John McCain and Lindsey Graham. These Weekly Standard favorites refused to pull the trigger on the "nuclear option," which would have banned the filibuster and made it easier for the president to nominate someone with a well-known record as a judicial conservative.

Again, why the rush to assume we've been sold out? From evidence presented thusfar, there's every reason to assume the opposite. "Put not your faith in princes" --the Prez. could sell us out, but is it likely after all this time? I'm not happy with the "elitist" & "sexist" accusations the White House has trotted out against Conservatives, but George Will started it by calling the President too stupid to have a judicial philosophy. The president who has transformed 1/3 of the federal judiciary deserves a lot more respect.

I don't think the pundits understand how terrible they sound in the ears of those not of the lawyer class. We know nothing less about Miers than we know about Roberts; Roberts wasn't one of the "names" floating around on Conservatives' list of welcome appointments, and those of us who aren't lawyers had to accept Bush's word that Roberts would be good. What seems to bug these pundits most is that they find themselves in the same position as the rest of the country was for Roberts: not in the loop and having to trust the Prez. That and the fact Miers, while a lawyer, isn't drawn from the professional lawyer class that bids fair to control every aspect of our government. In their previous lives, Conservatives opposed the encroachment of this lawyer class, but, alas, apparently no more. Welcome to our world, boys and girls!