Carek1230
Blue Crack Overdose Get me off the internetz!
The title of this thread should be changed.
Bush *PICKS* his nose.
Bush *chooses* aide for Supreme court.
Bush *PICKS* his nose.
Bush *chooses* aide for Supreme court.
Irvine511 said:
i'm just fooling around. really, who knows and who really cares?
MrsSpringsteen said:I think a 60 year old woman who has never been married could just be a bloody genius and that alone qualifies her
MrsSpringsteen said:I just didn't want you to be mad at me Irvine
I think I will be Harriet Miers Jr.. w/ out the heavy eyeliner, oh and the WH job too
Irvine511 said:
oh, i always understand what you mean. i can't imagine getting mad at you.
(unless you pick a bad movie when we go out on our date)
Founding Fathers oppose Miers nomination
As any quick look at Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers' record shows, the distinguishing feature of her career has been her blind loyalty to President Bush. Few have argued that her selection is anything more than a reward for her loyalty - it certainly isn't because of her highly controversial legal career helping defraud investors. And we need look no further than America's founding fathers to see just how antithetical they viewed such a nomination.
Just look at the Federalist Papers, #76, in which Alexander Hamilton discusses why the founding fathers gave the U.S. Senate the power to confirm - or reject - the President's Supreme Court nominees:
"To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment..."
The passage gets even more specific about political cronies like Miers:
"[The President] would be both ashamed and afraid to bring forward, for the most distinguished or lucrative stations, candidates who had no other merit than that of coming from the same State to which he particularly belonged, or of being in some way or other personally allied to him, or of possessing the necessary insignificance and pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of his pleasure."
Let me translate: the framers thought that the mere existence of the U.S. Senate's advise and consent powers should deter a President from nominating someone like Miers in the first place. Of course, the incredibly arrogant Bush administration has shown us that's not the case and that their desire to put their cronies in high places is their foremost priority. Even so, the message is still clear: the framers wanted the U.S. Senate to reject nominees like Miers, just like it rejected Democratic nominees like Abe Fortas on the same grounds of cronyism. They wanted, in short, a truly independent judiciary - not one that serves at the pleasure and loyalty of any one President or political party.
THIS IS WHAT 'ADVICE AND CONSENT' MEANS
October 5, 2005
I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush's real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.
Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney, and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a true conservative and listing Barney's many virtues — loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture ...
Harriet Miers went to Southern Methodist University Law School, which is not ranked at all by the serious law school reports and ranked No. 52 by US News and World Report. Her greatest legal accomplishment is being the first woman commissioner of the Texas Lottery.
I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that's a good rule of thumb. But not when it comes to the Supreme Court.
First, Bush has no right to say "Trust me." He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years. Among the coalitions that elected Bush are people who have been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. While Bush was still boozing it up in the early '80s, Ed Meese, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and all the founders of the Federalist Society began creating a farm team of massive legal talent on the right.
To casually spurn the people who have been taking slings and arrows all these years and instead reward the former commissioner of the Texas Lottery with a Supreme Court appointment is like pinning a medal of honor on some flunky paper-pusher with a desk job at the Pentagon — or on John Kerry — while ignoring your infantrymen doing the fighting and dying.
Second, even if you take seriously William F. Buckley's line about preferring to be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty, the Supreme Court is not supposed to govern us. Being a Supreme Court justice ought to be a mind-numbingly tedious job suitable only for super-nerds trained in legal reasoning like John Roberts. Being on the Supreme Court isn't like winning a "Best Employee of the Month" award. It's a real job.
One Web site defending Bush's choice of a graduate from an undistinguished law school complains that Miers' critics "are playing the Democrats' game," claiming that the "GOP is not the party which idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and mental fitness." (In the sort of error that results from trying to sound "Ivy League" rather than being clear, that sentence uses the grammatically incorrect "which" instead of "that." Web sites defending the academically mediocre would be a lot more convincing without all the grammatical errors.)
nbcrusader said:I bet you haven't read this many conservative pundits in a long time....
deep said:[ Focus on the Family man is ready to give non-family Harriet his firm support.
Irvine511 said:
nothing about that man is or gets firm.
MrsSpringsteen said:Btw Irvine, I heard on Howard Stern that Harriet has a man friend that she's had a "semi romantic" relationship w/ for thirty years or something like that..