Bush Blinks on Court Pick
by Vincent Fiore

This last month has been  particularly  brutal for President George W. Bush.  Through no fault of his own, Bush has had to deal with the fickleness of nature--Hurricanes Katrina and Rita--and the harsh political damage that came with them. Energy prices have shot up. His House majority leader has been indicted. His own White House staff may be involved in the CIA leak investigation.

With all what ails the Republican Party lately, how should the GOP faithful look at Bush’s second pick for the Supreme Court, White House counsel Harriet Miers?  If I had to choose a single word, that word would be “wrong.”

In Miers, a Bush loyalist since his days as Texas Governor, conservatives know even less than they did regarding Bush’s first pick, John Roberts, who is now the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

The talk of today is why Bush opted for a “stealth” candidate when so many “known” conservative jurist were available?  The stock answer will be that to George W. Bush, there is nothing of “stealth” regarding Harriet Miers.

But to conservatives and Republicans, Supreme Court appointments is an issue that has kept the GOP faithful severely distrustful and reflexively morose regarding any candidate that does not have a de-facto conservative track record.

Bush’s pick of Miers may signal that the “bring’em on” Bush of the first term has gone, to be replaced by the more accommodating--or shell-shocked--Bush of today.  But as many Bush supporters and Supreme Court watchers both will tell you, this is fundamentally damaging to future election prospects for the GOP, and crippling to restoring the courts as the arbiters of Constitutional law, and not the makers of law.

Many are openly critical of Bush’s pick of Harriet Miers, and make no secret about it.  Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, says that he is “disappointed, depressed, and demoralized.”  Conservative/Libertarian Pat Buchanan says of Miers that her “qualifications for the Supreme Court are non-existent.”

Certainly, there are advocates of Miers, like the American Center for Law and Justice, and James Dobson’s organization, Focus on the Family. (www.aclj.org/news/Read.aspx?ID=1911)

But for rank and file conservatives, the last thing wanted was, as Time magazine says, Bush going “with safety for his second Supreme Court nomination.” Leave “safety” for the party out of power, as about all Democrats could do is minimal damage control against a truly determined majority party. (www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1112960,00.html)

This pick by Bush may be more about the perils he faces within his own Party--namely Republican moderates who only last week dictated their terms to Bush regarding his nominee. (http://www.gopusa.com/commentary/vfiore/2005/vf_09291.shtml)

Or it may be that all the bellyaching and hair-pulling over Harriet Miers is misplaced, as it is possible that she will turn out to be, as Bush promised, in the “mold of a Scalia or Thomas.”

But that’s just it, isn’t it?  Conservatives won’t know with Miers, anymore than they really know with Chief Justice Roberts, or anymore than we thought we knew with justices O’Connor, Kennedy, Souter, and even John Paul Stevens.

But most of all, nominating an openly and unabashed conservative jurist was a fight that conservative advocates were willing--even eager--to have against any and all comers, most specifically the Democrats in the Senate.  It is a fight that is long overdue.

With the pick of Harriet Miers, the White House has managed not only to annoy the Democrats, but the Republicans as well.  No matter what, most Republicans expect Senate Democrats to flay alive any Bush nomination that comes before them, if only for liberal fundraising material.

But for conservatives, the nomination of Miers, more so than the Roberts nomination, represents all the nightmares and misgivings of the last 30 years of Supreme Court picks, wondering how a supposed conservative jurist turns out to be a liberal social activist in black robes.

On this pick of Harriet Miers, Bush is wrong for not having that fight that conservatives have been waiting to have for decades, and wrong for not rewarding those who have trusted and supported him throughout his presidency.

Now, all conservatives can do is wait, and pray that Bush has that SCOTUS crystal ball that eluded Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. when they appointed their “paths of least resistance” candidates to the bench.

Vincent Fiore is a freelance political writer who lives in New York City.

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