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.