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10/5/05 Supreme Prognostications When George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to the post of Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (and later to the post of Chief Justice after the untimely death of William Rehnquist), conservatives were ecstatic and liberals started casting about for just the right stone to throw at him. Everyone believed he was a "known quantity" with such a trail of arguments and cases and briefs and legal advice. But what would he do with Roe v. Wade? He wouldn't say. There are two possibilities: 1) he will argue that Roe is a bad ruling and will therefore vote to overturn it. 2) he will argue that Roe is a bad ruling but it is such a part of American life that it would disrupt our legal system were it to be overturned. So we really don't know anything. And George W. Bush doesn't know, either. Fast forward to this week: The President appoints Harriet Miers, who has no judicial experience at all, to the post of Associate Justice in place of the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Conservatives are nervous and liberals don't know whether to leap for joy or jump off the nearest bridge. Miers is an unknown, with no significant paper trail to investigate, no rulings to parse. At least she is so to most of us. But she is not so to the President. Nervous conservatives grouse that the President has failed to appoint an in-your-face conservative jurist in whom we could all have absolute faith. But remember, folks, that we can't even have that much faith in the new Chief Justice, with his extensive paper trail. The perfect nominee to the Supreme Court is a canard, because none will ever answer the questions we all want answered before we give them a stamp of approval. The President says he knows Miers and that she will be a judicial conservative until she dies. That is just about as much a guarantee of how she will vote on Roe v. Wade and other critical issues as we have from John Roberts' paper trail. So let's just sit back and watch the confirmation, and we'll know soon enough whether the President's judgment is accurate. Anything else would be just another tempest in a teapot. Modified: 10/12/2005 |
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