First Door on the Left

Today’s reading assignment: The Real Lesson of Bork by Cenk Uygur.

Here are a few paragraphs to whet your appetite:

Miers was picked for a couple of reasons. The first is undying loyalty to President Bush, which is the main qualifier you have to have to get any important government job these days. According to former Bush speechwriter David Frum, she called the President “the most brilliant man she had ever met.” You have to be either a gigantic liar or a gigantic fool to believe that. Or, as with Ms. Miers, you have to be a professional ass-kisser.

But her other qualification was that she didn’t have other qualifications. She has done nothing that would indicate her true beliefs – the perfect recipe for a conservative judge you want to sneak on to the court. This is getting absurd.

Harriet Miers is perfect because she hasn’t even been a judge. No opinions on the record on anything. It was one thing when brilliant minds like Earl Warren, the Governor of California moved on to the Supreme Court without being a judge. But Miers was the President’s Staff Secretary from 2000-2003. She was in charge of the paper work that came into the Oval Office. That’s one of the top nine legal minds in the country? That’s one of the nine most experienced and qualified judges in the country?

Soon, they will be nominating people right before they go law school to make sure they don’t even have any legal exams or papers that could be scrutinized. This whole process has become a sham. It’s a race to the bottom to find the least qualified, least experienced candidates.

This is part of the reason true believers on the right are upset. They now realize the President is embarrassed of them. He cannot pick one of their intellectual stalwarts because the administration realizes the American people don’t agree with the conservative movement. This has to be a painful moment of reckoning for the right. They will never get any of their true, principled legal scholars on the court. The best they can hope for is people who are so unqualified for the job that they might be able to trick the American people into thinking they are moderates.

I have never met Harriet Miers and know very little about her aside from what I’ve read in the newspapers, yet I oppose her nomination to serve as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Why?

Because she idolizes and worships The Doofus.

Doofus

In my book, that is reason enough.

Once described by White House chief of staff Andrew Card as “one of the favorite people in the White House,” Miers has been there for President Bush at every turn for more than a decade.

She was Bush’s personal lawyer in Texas, took on the thankless job of cleaning up the Texas Lottery when he was governor, and followed him to Washington to serve as staff secretary, the person who controls every piece of paper that crosses the president’s desk…

Miers’ loyalty to Bush is above question. When he first decided to run for governor in the early 1990s, he hired Miers to comb his background for anything derogatory that opponents might try to use to defeat him.

Miers also introduced Bush to Alberto Gonzales, who served as Bush’s counsel while governor and later in Washington, before being named U.S. attorney general.

During Bush’s first term as governor, Gonzales used information turned up by Miers to persuade a local judge to excuse Bush from jury duty, a civic task that would have forced him to disclose his 1976 arrest for drunken driving in Maine. The incident was not divulged until the waning days of Bush’s 2000 campaign for the White House…

As White House staff secretary, Miers was with the president in Florida when the terrorist attacks unfolded on Sept. 11, 2001, and she later remembered the regard she felt for him as she scrambled to help prepare his remarks to the nation that night. “It took some time, and the president saw me hurrying to give them to him,” she recalled. “He said, ’Good hustle.’ He made me feel good that I was contributing. Typical.”…

Miers reveals little of her own emotions or ideological persuasions, but has been an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush administration on a broad of initiatives including tax cuts, Social Security reforms, restrictions on federal spending on embryonic stem cell research, national security, education reforms and fighting terrorism.

In hosting an “Ask the White House” interactive forum on the Web before the 2004 elections, Miers lavished praise on a litany of Bush administration initiatives, then added, “I could go on and on.”

Miers briefing Bush