[Welcome, readers of The Remedy. For my reaction to Will's column, go here.]
Just got a note from someone who wrote something I've been thinking, too. My worry about Conservatives is that while they differ 180 degrees from Liberals on policy matters, they usually share precisely the same conception of the Supreme Court. Rehnquist, may he rest in peace, was famous for "defending" the independence of the Court, which is a good thing if it means insulating the Court from political influences and bribery. But these days we have come to understand "independence" as superiority. We all --Right & Left-- bow to our robed masters --a trend I see as a corruption in Constitutional thinking and Thomas alone among sitting Justices understands. In other words, I see the Court problem of the past several decades not chiefly as a problem of liberalism, but a problem of the big SCOTUS power grab.
Every now and again something happens that reveals the Ivy League snob wing of the Republican Party, and the hysteria over Miers on the Right strikes me as one of those instances. John Podhoretz calls the nomination "unserious" (although to be fair, he's not one of those hysterically against her), but why? Her resumé is impressive. I suspect the objection is she didn't graduate from an Ivy League school.
I think Bush wants to shake the Court up --and finding a jurist modest enough to show appropriate deference to the other branches of government --which are co-equal interpreters of the Constitution, not subservient to the Court -- may actually go beyond anything Ronald Reagan ever hoped for. I stipulate that this is guesswork (see my previous posts on the subject), but there it is. Here are two other people who think Bush may be pulling another of his Rope-a-dope moves. The Anchoress and The American Thinker. UPDATE: and PoliPundit.
[Tags: Harriet Miers]
