October
7, 2005
Republican Senate Is Weak, Not Bush
By Thomas
Sowell
Conservatives
who have for years contributed time, money, and sweat to help
elect Republicans have often been justifiably outraged at the
way the Republicans have then let them down, wimped out, or even
openly betrayed the promises on which they were elected.
Much of
that frustration and anger is now being directed at President
Bush for his nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers to
the Supreme Court. Why not someone like Judge Janice Rogers Brown
or any of a number of other identifiable judges with a proven
history of upholding conservative judicial principles under fire?
Looming
in the background is the specter of people like Justice Anthony
Kennedy, who went on the High Court with a "conservative"
label and then succumbed to the Washington liberal culture. But
while the past is undeniable, it is also not predestination.
Article
Continues Below
This administration
needs to be held responsible for its own shortcomings but not
those of previous Republican administrations.
Rush Limbaugh has
aptly called this a nomination made from a position of weakness.
But there are different kinds of weakness and sometimes the difference
matters.
President Bush has
taken on too many tough fights -- Social Security being a classic
example -- to be regarded as a man who is personally weak. What
is weak is the Republican majority in the Senate.
When it comes to
taking on a tough fight with the Senate Democrats over judicial
nominations, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist doesn't really
have a majority to lead. Before the President nominated anybody,
before he even took the oath of office for his second term, Senator
Arlen Specter was already warning him not to nominate anyone who
would rile up the Senate. Later, Senator John Warner issued a
similar warning. It sounded like a familiar Republican strategy
of pre-emptive surrender.
Before we can judge
how the President played his hand, we have to consider what kind
of hand he had to play. It was a weak hand -- and the weakness
was in the Republican Senators.
Does this mean that
Harriet Miers will not be a good Supreme Court justice if she
is confirmed? It is hard to imagine her being worse than Sandra
Day O'Connor -- or even as bad.
The very
fact that Harriet Miers is a member of an evangelical church suggests
that she is not dying to be accepted by the beautiful people,
and is unlikely to sell out the Constitution of the United States
in order to be the toast of Georgetown cocktail parties or praised
in the New York Times. Considering some of the turkeys
that Republicans have put on the Supreme Court in the past, she
could be a big improvement.
We don't know. But
President Bush says he has known Harriet Miers long enough that
he feels sure.
For the rest of us,
she is a stealth nominee. Not since The Invisible Man has there
been so much stealth.
That's not ideal
by a long shot. But ideal was probably never in the cards, given
the weak sisters among the Republicans' Senate "majority."
There is another
aspect of this. The Senate Democrats huffed and puffed when Judge
John Roberts was nominated but, in the end, he faced them down
and was confirmed by a very comfortable margin.
The Democrats cannot
afford to huff and puff and then back down, or be beaten down,
again. On the other hand, they cannot let a high-profile conservative
get confirmed without putting up a dogfight to satisfy their left-wing
special interest groups.
Perhaps that is why
some Democrats seem to welcome this stealth nominee. Even if she
turns out to vote consistently with Antonin Scalia and Clarence
Thomas, the Democrats are off the hook with their base because
they can always say that they had no idea and that she stonewalled
them at the confirmation hearings.
The bottom line with
any Supreme Court justice is how they vote on the issues before
the High Court. It would be nice to have someone with ringing
rhetoric and dazzling intellectual firepower. But the bottom line
is how they vote. If the President is right about Harriet Miers,
she may be the best choice he could make under the circumstances.
Copyright
2005 Creators Syndicate
Send
To a Friend | Printer
Friendly
