President Bush’s choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court should eventually end the debate about his intelligence.
Democrats, who have long questioned his intellect, now must hope their rhetoric matches reality and he isn’t smart enough to judge how she’ll rule once on the bench.
Conversely, his supporters must take the pick on faith _ trusting that she won’t be this Bush’s David Souter, whom the president’s father named to the court and turned out to be among its more liberal members.
That’s because there is little evidence how Miers thinks about some of the most controversial issues of the day. Given the confirmation process, we are unlikely to find out until she begins issuing rulings.
It’s apparent that Miers is a pro-business conservative. She pays lip service to the notion that judges should interpret existing statutes, not make them by taking the law further than the elected representatives are willing to go.
Because she has never been a judge, or gone through congressional confirmation hearings for her White House jobs, however, we really don’t know much about the nitty-gritty of how her mind works. Barring a revelation that one assumes the White House vetting process has screened for, the chances of stopping her confirmation are slim to none.
It’s poor politics, especially for Red State Democrats who have to seek re-election, to turn someone who looks like your grandmother into Public Enemy No. 1, no matter how much cash abortion- and gay-rights groups may have given to their campaigns.
Which is why if Bush’s criterion for picking a Supreme Court justice is someone whose personal views are so unknown their impartiality can’t be called into question, he gets an A.
But if his goal is a justice he can absolutely count on to be a reliable conservative vote on controversial cases, then it’s not clear to the rest of us what grade he should get.
After all, Bush is one of the few people on Earth who has the insight to know, or reasonably suspect, how she will rule. One would assume that the president is sure of her views and values. He has known her for more than a decade, and she is the chief White House lawyer.
Yet because there is little, if any, public record that would lead a prudent person to conclude where she stands on the most controversial matters– like abortion, gay rights, immigration, etc.–it will not be clear to most of us or, for that matter, to the senators who must confirm her, how she will vote.
We have our suspicions, and the company she has kept in recent years would appear to provide clues. Yet history shows that presidents can appoint Supreme Court justices expecting them to have a specific judicial philosophy and be proved wrong.
Just look at Souter, a New Hampshire Supreme Court justice when tapped for the high court on the expectation by the elder Bush that he was a reliable conservative vote like Antonin Scalia.
Dwight Eisenhower was none too pleased with many of the rulings by Earl Warren, whom Ike made chief justice. But in both of those cases, the presidents did not know their nominees or their judicial philosophies well before hand.
Miers is another story.
We won’t know for a while, but, in the end, picking Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court will prove once and for all just how smart Bush really is.