There’s little sign that many conservatives’ ire and profound disappointment over President George Bush’s nomination of his lawyer Harriet Miers is subsiding.
From all indications, even many conservatives supporting Bush’s choice are holding their noses while doing so. If Bush is using his political capital (trust me = put your careers on the political chopping block for me), when the confirmation is over, he may be overdrawn.
The outlook (for now): She’ll squeak through. It isn’t in the nature of Bush to change course, there’s no indication he wants to change course, and there’s no indication Miers is planning on anything in her future but being on the court.
Miers isn’t prepping for hearings just to fill time in between steaming over anti-Harriet comments made by Bill Kristol and Pat Buchannan.
And, indeed, that’s the present political context: the Republican party, the epitome of a disciplined party after surviving the bitter divisions of the early to mid-60s to finally become the party stamped with Ronald Reagan’s conservative values, is now creaking with strains amid not-so-subtle hints of future political retribution.
Why? To many proud conservatives, the Miers selection was the equivalent of shoving conservatism into the political closet. Don’t ask don’t tell if she’s for overturning Roe Versus Wade. But Bush’s spurned conservative political lovers are not holding their feelings back. CNN has this:
Gary Bauer, director of the American Values Coalition, took issue with comments made by Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, who said last week that critics of the nomination should “shut up for a few minutes” and give people a chance to learn more about Miers.
“We’re not going to find out anything more,” Bauer told “Fox News Sunday.” “The whole strategy here is the so-called stealth strategy: picking candidates for the Supreme Court who have no judicial record on things that really matter.”
The approach has been tried before, he said, and “the only ones who get fooled by it are conservatives.”
Bush seemingly winks at Democrats and suggests she’s a conservative they can live with.
Bush seemingly winks at conservatives and suggests she’s one of them.
There’s so much winking going on, you’d swear it was the Clinton White House….
But if conservatives are unamused, so are moderates, Democrats and some conservatives when they found out Focus On The Family bigwig James Dobson told his listeners that he had been told some information he can’t reveal about Miers that would reassure them (i.e. that she would vote to overturn Roe Versus Wade). Be sure to add Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Spector to the list of Inquiring Minds Want To Know:
“If Dr. Dobson knows something that he shouldn’t know or something that I ought to know, I’m going to find out,” Mr. Specter said Sunday in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on the ABC News program “This Week.”
In response to a later question, Mr. Specter added, “If there are back-room assurances and if there are back-room deals and if there is something which bears upon a precondition as to how a nominee is going to vote, I think that’s a matter that ought to be known by the Judiciary Committee and the American people.”
Mr. Dobson, the influential founder of the conservative evangelical group Focus on the Family, has said he is supporting Ms. Miers’s nomination in part because of something he has been told but cannot divulge. He has not disclosed the source of the information, but he has acknowledged speaking with Karl Rove, President Bush’s top political adviser, about the president’s pick before it was announced.
On his radio program last Wednesday, Mr. Dobson said, “When you know some of the things that I know – that I probably shouldn’t know – you will understand why I have said, with fear and trepidation, that I believe Harriet Miers will be a good justice.” He added, in a reference to aborted fetuses, “if I have made a mistake here, I will never forget the blood of those babies that will die will be on my hands to some degree.”
That statement is raising a lot of eyebrows.
Perhaps the best analysis of what’s going on inside the Republican party right now is in a piece by blogger Edward Morrissey published in the Washington Post. Morrissey, who also has the blog Capitain’s Corner writes:
Well, he’s finally done it. By nominating White House lawyer Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, George Bush has managed to accomplish what Al Gore, John Kerry, Tom Daschle and any number of Democratic heavyweights have been unable to do: He has cracked the Republican monolith. Split his own party activists. And how.
The president’s surprise pick to replace Sandra Day O’Connor has ignited a massive debate among his former loyalists, especially in the blogosphere, where I spend a fair amount of time. Wails of betrayal are clashing with assurances of the president’s brilliant strategic thinking. Meanwhile, the heavyweights of punditry drop columns like artillery shells into what already may be a conservative civil war.
The question on so many minds on the right is: What in Bork’s name was Bush thinking?
Morrissey then divides the GOP into four camps and explains each one in detail. This excellent piece MUST be read IN FULL.
He puts himself into the category of the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces who don’t like the selection and won’t pretend they will but will go along with it for the good of the party:
Despite our normal support for the president, we Dogfaces fail to recognize George Bush’s supposed brilliance in naming his personal lawyer to the bench, whatever Hugh Hewitt says. Even if Miers obviously has earned Bush’s trust, she just as obviously has done nothing remarkable to earn the trust of conservatives; being a mover and shaker in the American Bar Association doesn’t lend her much credibility among those who have watched that group get more and more politically activist in what we view as the wrong direction. Most of us have tired of the “trust me” approach. In short, we find ourselves with some sympathy for the Rebel Alliance.
However, we also see the realistic outcome of the bloody civil war that threatens to split the GOP over what clearly is a White House blunder — one compounded by White House adviser Ed Gillespie’s charging the Rebel Alliance with “sexism” at last week’s meeting. With important mid-term elections next year and at least one more Supreme Court opening likely during Bush’s term, we want to avoid a party schism that could make him a prematurely lame duck and hand the Democrats an opportunity to seize control of one or both houses of Congress.
Morrissey explains a bit more on his own blog (which also does a good job of commenting on foreign news), as he elaborates on his analysis:
The analysis has the conservatives breaking up into three factions — the Loyalist Army, the Rebel Alliance, and the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces. I’m hoping that a lighter touch will help cool down the tempers on all sides and provide Post readers with a taste of the conservative blogosphere when it debates its own.
Yet, the Miers’ nomination flap touches on an issue bigger than an individual nomination, bigger than the Supreme Court: it’s the role of party members and their parties.
The battle raging in the Republican party seems to be the beginnings of backlash against the relatively tight control Bush and his political maven Karl Rove have exercised over the party in recent years. Why the control? Part of it is homework, political skills, organizational skills and toughness. But part of it is because you can’t argue with success and the GOP — the Bush faction in particular — had been successful due to skills, the handling of unforseen events, plus the hapless performance of the Democrats.
Now events have soured, the political people with the skills are either off-game or distracted by other matters such as the large number of crises battering the White House or legal issues (read that: Plamegate). And the hapless Democrats are slightly less hapless under Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. Which is s start.
Morrissey and other Republicans are basically saying they don’t want to wink anymore. They’ll oppose the selection, or go along with it and be honest about it, but they’re NOT going to wink and pretend this nomination is anything but what it is — the President appointing a close friend and his personal lawyer to a slot that could have been filled with a jurist or lawyer who has a discernible record of deep thought and written decisions.
In essence, Republicans are demanding a more above-board form of politics than this White House wants to practice.
UCLA law Professor Steve Bainbridge has been one of the most outspoken weblog writers against the Miers nomination. In a long post that needs to be read in its entirety he writes:
Nor is the main risk the very real prospect that letting Miers sail through without conservative opposition will let Bush and the party leaders feel confident they can continue shafting the base, which would eventually backfire if angry activists sit out the 2006 and 2008 election cycles. The risk is that we’ll never again have as good a chance as we do right now to fight and win the battle to, as Henninger put it, “confirm someone who had participated in this conservative legal reconstruction and who would describe its tenets in a confirmation hearing,” so that that “vote would stand as an institutional validation of those ideas. This would become a conservatism worth aspiring to.” Indeed.
This is a fight we can afford. It’s the right fight. Those of us who oppose Miers need to keep on fighting.
But does the base support Miers? According to the Washington Times, YES:
The Republican base across the country looks more favorably on President Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court than the cluster of conservative critics who are opposing her inside the Beltway, according to a Washington Times survey of state party chairmen.
Most Republican chairmen interviewed expressed confidence in Mr. Bush’s choice and said they were picking up little, if any, criticism from their rank and file, though some said they wanted to know more about Miss Miers and expected to learn more once the Senate confirmation process gets under way.
Eileen Melvin, chairwoman of the Pennsylvania Republican Party, said she had just come from a meeting with state committee members in conservative Lancaster County, where she asked them what they thought of the Miers nomination. “They said we trust the president,” she said.
“The president has defined what he was looking for in a Supreme Court nominee from Day One, so the folks I’ve spoken with understand that he knows Harriet Miers and they trust that he has nominated someone who meets his standards,” Mrs. Melvin said.
In Oregon, “the rank and file of the party are generally concerned that various conservatives are beating up on the president about the Miers appointment,” party Chairman Vance Day said.
So, if this is correct, if the President says trust me, she’s the most qualified person in the country with for this slot, the GOP’s rank and file goes along with it because the President says trust me.
That makes sense. After all, the GOP party chairmen who are part of the party apparatus don’t have any axe to grind in getting the party line out.
Wink.
UPDATE: Right Wing News’ John Hawkins polled 400 right of center blogs and got responses from 79 of them. Read the complete results here, but in a nutshell the winning margins went to: not liking the Miers selection, now thinking less of George Bush, hoping he’ll stick by the nomination (the one contradictory number) and hoping Republican Senators will vote against Miers. Winning margins were generally small — underscoring the party’s split.
UPDATE III: Our co-blogger Michael Stickings has a must read extensive blog roundup on this raging issue on his site The Reaction.
UPDATE IV: Just HOW BAD has it gotten for the administration among conservatives? The controversy is so huge that Glenn Reynolds, aka Intapundit, has opened up his comments on his site — something he only does for monster issues. Read his whole post and the comments but here’s a small taste 4 U:
More and more, I have to wonder what the White House was thinking with this. First of all, when you’re already under fire for cronyism, and you nominate someone who’s, well, a crony, you ought to be locked-and-loaded in terms of response. They weren’t.
Second of all, they seem to have managed to convince a lot of people on the social right that she’s too liberal, while people on the libertarian-right worry that she’s too much a fan of government power. Third, their response to critics and complaints has been slow and weak.
I realize that the White House is busy — perhaps busier than we realize from news coverage — with a lot of war and foreign-policy questions. But if so, isn’t that more reason to go with a safe pick of the Michael McConnell variety? Whatever else she is (and she could, of course, turn out to be fine as a Justice) Miers wasn’t a safe pick.
If you like fireworks, read the comments on his post…that are pouring in as we write this.
UPDATE V: Is this the final straw for conservatives? Read OUR POST HERE about Miers’ Hillary Clinton connection…
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.