Bush tries to establish religious test for Supreme Court

Earlier today, Peregrin Wood discussed how Karl Rove had leaked information about Harriet Miers to right wing religious fringe groups like Focus on the Family – in spite of the fact that the Bush White House is refusing to provide similar information to the Judiciary Committee of the United States Senate. The Senate has the constitutional power of confirming or denying all presidential nominations to the Supreme Court, and has the power to subpoena documents from the White House in order to carry out that task. The Bush Administration has been steadfast in interfering with this constitutionally-guaranteed function of the Senate.

It turns out that Karl Rove not only discussed Harriet Miers’s professional and personal dedication to overturning Roe v. Wade, but also discussed the religious beliefs of Harriet Miers as a reason to back her confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Today, President Bush himself informed reporters at the White House that he had instructed his aides to provide information about the religious beliefs of Harriet Miers to right wing activist groups. Bush said that he believed that the religion of Harriet Miers was an important factor in the decision of Americans to support her confirmation to a lifetime position on the Supreme Court.

Essentially, President Bush was saying that United States Senators should confirm Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court because of her religion. Such a suggestion is not only unprecedented, it is blatantly unconstitutional, and therefore illegal.

Section Six, Clause Three of the Constitution of the United States of America reads, “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” There’s no way for right wingers to deny it – the Constitution forbids the use of religion as a qualification for public office.

Yet, George W. Bush is actively promoting Harriet Miers as a candidate for high public office on little more than her religious affiliation. What else, after all, has Bush let the Senate know about Harriet Miers? Our senators know just about as much about the beliefs of the church that Harriet Miers attends as they know about her legal record.

Such tactics are a shameful betrayal of Bush’s oath to uphold and defend the Constitution. If America’s senators accept these tactics, they will be complicit in this betrayal.

It is up to the Senate now to rally around the Constitution, and protect our Supreme Court from a Christian theocratic takeover. They must demand the information that the Bush Administration has refused to provide. If the Bush Administration is willing to share such private information about Harriet Miers as her religious beliefs, then the Bush Administration has ceded all pretense of some abstract “executive privilege” to withhold information from the Senate about Miers’s legal activities while serving as White House counsel.

The very fact that Bush would suggest that Miers’s right wing Christianity makes her more qualified for the Supreme Court than other candidates who are not right wing Christians is cause for significant alarm. We now have good reason to believe that when the Bushes insist that Harriet Miers is the most qualified person in America to sit on the Supreme Court, they are thinking primarily of Miers’s dedication to an extremist religious ideology that stands significantly outside the American mainstream. That religious ideology has also repeatedly demonstrated a profound lack of respect for the rights of other Americans to live free of coerced participation in religious worship.

We have good reason to fear that the America Harriet Miers seeks to impose through her new judicial power would have more in common with our dark colonial history of religiously-inspired torture and execution than with the free and pluralistic society we have come to take for granted.