More on Miers

Our good friend NC points us to John Fund's latest missive in the Journal regarding the vetting -- or lack thereof -- for Harriet Myers' nomination. Check out this passage...

Indeed, even internal advice was shunned. Mr. Card is said to have shouted down objections to Ms. Miers at staff meetings. A senator attending the White House swearing-in of John Roberts four days before the Miers selection was announced was struck by how depressed White House staffers were during discussion of the next nominee. He says their reaction to him could have been characterized as, "Oh brother, you have no idea what's coming."

A last minute effort was made to block the choice of Ms. Miers, including the offices of Vice President Cheney and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. It fell on deaf ears. First Lady Laura Bush, who went to Southern Methodist University at the same time as Ms. Miers, weighed in. On Sunday night, the president dined with Ms. Miers and the first lady to celebrate the nomination of what one presidential aide inartfully praised to me as that of "a female trailblazer who will walk in the footsteps of President Bush."

"Shouted down" objections? Look, it's bad enough that I spent three years in law school and countless years afterward listening to the idiots on the left act as if volume won arguments. This is absurd.

I would link to David Brooks' stinging takedown of Miers' writing abilities in the left-wing dishrag, but they don't let anyone have access to their editorial page anymore without paying a fee (more likely it's sheer embarrassment regarding any Paul Krugman column, but we digress). But if you get the dishrag at home, definitely read it (I can't believe I just wrote those words). Meanwhile, James Taranto lets us know why we should be uneasy...

President Bush last week expressed his confidence in the constancy of Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, saying that "20 years from now she'll be the same person, with the same philosophy," as she is today. White House aides making the case for Miers, meanwhile, have been insisting that she is a reliable conservative. Since she has no judicial record and has had little to say about constitutional law, we can only guess at what her judicial philosophy might be, if indeed she has one at all. But if she is a political conservative, then she has not remained constant over the past 20 years.

We base this on a look at her testimony in Williams v. Dallas, a voting-rights case from 1989, when Miers was an at-large member of the Dallas City Council. Read over it and the impression that emerges is of a left-leaning centrist, not a conservative.

...The Drudge Report has picked up one aspect of this testimony: her declaration that she had refrained from joining "politically charged" organizations like the Federalist Society, even though she had been a member of the liberal Progressive Voters League. When the lawyer questioning her asked if the NAACP (of which she was not a member) was "in the category of organizations you were talking about"--i.e., "politically charged"--she answered "no." Notes Drudge: "In 1987, the NAACP launched a campaign to defeat the nomination of Judge Robert Bork to the Supreme Court; In 1989, the group organized the Silent March; over 100,000 protested U.S. Supreme Court decisions the group claimed 'reversed many of the gains made against discrimination.' "

There's a lot more there, and it's not good. The words "David Souter" keep jumping to the fore.