Thursday, October 27, 2005

Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead

There is dancing in the streets this morning as Harriet Miers withdraws her nomination and restores (some) of my faith in the functioning of the government. The interesting bit in all this politically is that the lesson Bush probably takes from this experience is that he needs to come up with a candidate that is more outspokenly conservative, though some modicum of judicial credentials would probably help. This would seem to bode well for some of the female conservative firebrands on the various Courts of Appeal.

4 Comments:

Blogger Qian said...

Here's my question. Was the Miers nomination a real mistake on the part of Rove/Cheney or a clever ploy to wake up the ultra right wing of the Republican party in order to push through the next nominee? In any case, what we can expect next is someone far more qualified and explicitly anti Rowe. What are the cojones-challenged Congressional Democrats going to do about it?

10/27/2005 09:31:00 PM  
Blogger Justin said...

Qian- I assume that you meant "anti-Roe". I read your comment as "anti-Rove" the first few times, which really confused me.

If I were a conspiracy-minded person, I'd consider the possibility that Miers was a patsy that was designed to get the base worked up. I can't imagine anyone seriously believing that she had the gravitas to withstand a confirmation hearing (frankly, her blog alone ought to have disqualified her). On the other hand, Bush has never shown a lot of political finesse-- his style is much more straight-forward. I suspect this was much like FDR's idea to pack the Court-- something that made a lot of sense to the POTUS that no one in the administration had the cajones to challenge.

I'll be interested to see if the Democrats have a plan for the next nomination. A free bit of advice for them, though-- there are less than a dozen reasonable candidates. They better have a plan for how to handle this in place for how to handle any of those nominations before Bush names the nominee. They had better be vetting candidate opinions now and better be prepared to start the fight immediately. If they let the White House and Republican party dictate the first few news cycles, they're going to lose and they're going to lose badly.

10/28/2005 09:59:00 AM  
Blogger Qian said...

Yeah, I meant Roe. Where's the gmail spell checker when you need it? So the new nominee is "Scalito." Can the Dems block this one? Is it going to come down to a filibuster and the "nukular" option?

10/31/2005 11:18:00 AM  
Blogger Justin said...

My bet at this point would be that Alito will be confirmed. He's clearly qualified and assuming he comes off reasonably well in the confirmation hearings (which I expect he will since a Senate confirmation hearing is a heck of a lot less difficult to handle than a SCOTUS argument), I'd expect the Democrats to have difficulty articulating a rationale for a fillibuster.

If the Democrats are going to have a chance to block this nomination, they need to start now. Not a week from now, not when the hearings start, now. Unfortunately, they've shown a real inability to create and stick to a plan in recent years.

10/31/2005 03:20:00 PM  

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