I'm disappointed. I'm disgusted.
I'm disappointed that Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to the Supreme Court (here's the link to her withdrawal letter). I'm disappointed that I won't get the chance to see her for myself in the hearings, that I won't be able to either see some of the qualities that made President Bush believe she'd do well on the Supreme Court, or see her blathering inanities that would confirm her critics' analyses of her.
I'm disgusted by the way so many have treated Miers, hunting for the worst of what she has ever said or written, and interpreting things in the worst possible way. A case in point is the "affirmative action" document produced while she was head of the Texas Bar. Hugh Hewitt reproduced that document in the 10:50 AM Update at the bottom of this post yesterday. Many of the Miers critics used this to conclude that Miers was in favor of racial set-asides, and they assumed that this document meant Miers would come out in favor of hard-core affirmative action programs when she was on the bench. But the document spelled out a voluntary program that law firms were not required to sign up for. And the language is similar to this point at the end of the document (emphasis added):
(d) Ensuring equal opportunities for Minority Lawyers to achieve partnership or senior corporate counsel status by:
- Using the same criteria for Minority and Non-Minority Lawyers in evaluating lawyers for promotion to partnership or senior corporate counsel status
- Guiding the development of Minority Lawyers in the same manner as non-Minority Lawyers
- As Minority Lawyers near consideration for partnership or senior corporate counsel, assigning responsibility for important client matters to senior Minority Lawyers in the same manner and extent that such matters are assigned to senior non-Minority Lawyers.
What's so frightening about this?
Laura Ingraham seemed to be celebrating on her radio show, repeating the accusation that Miers favored minority set-asides. I couldn't listen, because this isn't a cause for celebration.
A good woman's reputation has been savaged. And her withdrawal leaves that tatters of a reputation as the last thing the public hears. "Harriet Miers? Isn't she that woman who couldn't cut it?" Her accomplishments speak better of her than this.
To the harshest of the Miers critics I say this: You raked the GOP half of the Gang of 14 over the coals for breaking ranks over judicial nominations, and then you broke ranks, yourselves, over judicial nominations. You reminded the Senate Democrats that they don't get veto power over nominees, but then you demanded veto power over Supreme Court nominees. You've made yourselves the new Gang of 14--the new arbiters of judicial qualifications. Pity the next nominee, who has to satisfy not only the Senate, but all of you as well.
This is a sad day, because the process got cut short without having a chance to work itself out.
Go ahead and gloat, all of you who feel as though you've "won." I'm not listening.
6 comments:
In your message to Mier's critics you make great points, exposing the hypocrisy on the right. Her conservative critics were often disrespectful of both Miers and the president. It was hard to listen to.
My nephew has a conservative Christian talk-radio show in Kokomo and he said during today's broadcast that he was relieved because he feared that the senate judicial committee would have eaten her alive. He also said that she demonstrated great integrity by sacrificing her ambitions for the sake of party unity. She is probably quite a woman. She deserved better.
Nice summation, Skye Puppy.
Jeremy,
In fact the Post did get the facts wrong and Hugh Hewitt (and others) went through the speech to find out what it did say.
It is now going to be a lot harder to get the type of nominee that conservatives say that "we" all want.
Already PoliPundit is saying (to Jonah Goldberg's dismay) that he withholds judgment on McConnell as the nominee.
Many of us would be very happy with McConnell. But now the genii is out of the bottle. We will have to see who lets his or her inner control freak loose.
Great. Just great.
Jeremy,
Thanks for the link to the WaPo article. I hadn't seen it. Did you see this quote in paragraph 6 of that article?
"The best I can tell, this was a private-sector initiative to increase diversity, which is not the same thing as a government mandate of quotas," he said.
The text of the document was all about goals (not quotas), and intentions for equal treatment of minorities and non-minorities.
Personally, because I know the Washington Post tends to lean left and doesn't always give the best spin to the President, I usually take what they say with a grain of salt. From looking at the document on Hugh's blog, it looks like the WaPo article needs the whole salt shaker.
Jeremy,
Again, I don't trust the WaPo to be entirely accurate or fair in its reporting of matters relating to the Bush White House.
The document does not spell out set-asides. In one spot it indicates, "A desirable goal (not a quota) to be achieved would be equal to 10 percent of the total number of all lawyers hired by such firm or corporate legal department during the period 1993-1998." This was in the context of 2.1% of the partners and 4.8% of the associates in the top 18 Texas law firms being minorities. And you've got to know that Texas has a much higher percentage of minorities in the population than that.
Did you read the document? Did you find any wording besides the 10% goal I quoted that specified any preference be given to minorities? All I can find is that the firms are encouraged to ensure that they're not overlooking qualified minorities in their hiring, promoting, and training. I really don't see the problem in this document that you see in the WaPo article.
"We" aren't forgetting about Miers and the U of Michigan case, because I wasn't aware of that point. If you got the information from the WaPo, I'd recommend you get further verification from a source that's not in perpetual anti-Bush spin mode.
I've already said that I objected to the withdrawal of her name, because I wanted to see how she handled herself in the hearings before I fully decided one way or the other about confirmation. There was so much information coming out about Miers, and so much of it appeared cherry-picked to make her look the worst possible. I realize a lot of people felt the pre-hearing information was enough to turn them away from any chance of support. But I didn't see enough balance or fairness in what was presented about her or the way it was presented to make me comfortable with making a decision about her confirmation.
As Chris said in the first comment, she deserved better.
Very well-spoken, Sky Puppy. Hugh Hewitt has earned a lot of credibility with me, and I aligned with the anti-anti Miers crowd of conservatives. Some of the attacks on Miers was just grossly unfair, I thought. Laura Ingraham was very hard to listen to. I thought she really shut down any debate on the matter, and was dead set not to take a step back and see that she in fact does carry some elitist baggage around with her. Her first criteria on judicial picks, regarding not taking into account one's personal assessment of character....well, I'm sorry, but I think President Bush has a flawless record on judicial nominations and is someone who believes character counts. You can't always go by a "paper trail" as we've seen from previous judicial appointments who had a conservative paper trail, but turned into something other than what we thought they were.
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