Someone help me here: is it the world that has turned upside-down, or is it me? I find myself agreeing with George Will:
Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption — perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting — should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due. It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court’s tasks. The president’s “argument” for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.
He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.
Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers’s nomination resulted from the president’s careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers’s name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.
…
It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court’s role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president’s choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.
The wisdom of presumptive opposition to Miers’s confirmation flows from the fact that constitutional reasoning is a talent — a skill acquired, as intellectual skills are, by years of practice sustained by intense interest. It is not usually acquired in the normal course of even a fine lawyer’s career. The burden is on Miers to demonstrate such talents, and on senators to compel such a demonstration or reject the nomination.
There are other passages in Will’s column that I don’t agree with. But in the text above, he’s spot on. What is there we know right know about Harriet Miers that suggests she is right for the Supreme Court? Nothing, except that she’s a lawyer and George W. Bush likes her. Everything else is being conveniently hidden from the public, from the media, and from the Senate. George Will can’t and won’t use this word, so I will: that’s bullshit. If the standard of governance is that it’s up to the public to demonstrate that a government course of action (for a policy or a nomination) is not a good idea, then the standard of governance is harebrained, elitist, even aristocratic. It should be up to the government to demonstrate to the public that its suggested course of action is a good idea. The public comes first and the government serves it — not the other way around.
It’s not up to us to play George W. Bush’s game and try to ferret out some hidden detail that would show Harriet Miers is unfit for the Supreme Court. It’s up to Bush to demonstrate in substantive detail that Harriet Miers is fit for the Surpreme Court. Bush is our employee, not our dictator. Bush owes us an explanation.
