Trust Her, She's A Lawyer
A completely therapeutic
editorial
I keep thinking to myself that George Bush’s faceplate is going to fall off in a press conference and reveal he’s a cyborg just as they discover his actual body in Fort Marcy Park. Because if Bush wanted to lay in with a stealth Judicial candidate with little or no fiery darts from the wicked, he may have gotten his wish.
Problem is, he forgot that those of us who voted for him own blow guns as well.
Forget about the fact that Bush may be dead-on right. Forget about the fact that Harriet Miers could fall ten degrees to the right of Antonin Scalia. The question is why take any chance at all?
Those that say that we should trust President Bush fail to convince me that anything justifies president Bush performing a standard, Constitutional job in such a fashion that I need to connect an extention handle to the trust I’ve already placed in him. By giving us his personal lawyer with no judicial experience, he has added an extra mile to the trust process that is neither natural, nor logical to assume.
I will employ the “perfection based in threes” nostrum for my point. Let’s use a medical analogy:
1. Tummy hurts
2. Doctor says it the appendix
3. Appendix removed
Now, trust here lies in the fact that the doctor’s experiential integrity allows for him to “know” its my appendix, because an inflamed appendix carries with it some particular and consistent signs. But what if one day, that same doctor decided to arbitrarily remove an organ other than the appendix, and then ask the patient to “wait and see” if the infection curtails? You guessed it.
So what is wrong with expecting a “shortest distance between two points approach to a SCOTUS nomination?
1. O’Connor retires
2. Bush appoints a conservative replacement
3. Conservative replacement confirmed
But that’s not what we got. We got:
1. O’Connor retires
2. Bush appoints a drone
3.Bush asks us to trust the drone on his word
4. Drone confirmed
I have defended president Bush in his handlings of all the major disasters and attacks in and on this Nation. It has occurred to me many times, where we might be if Gore had been the man in the Oval Office on 9/11, and that scenario also would have fallen into a perfect three scenario for failure.
1. Planes fly into our skyscrapers
2. Gore promised to “get to bottom of it.”
3. Gore starts funding “mosques of tolerance.”
But 9/11, hurricane Katrina and whatever else are all cataclysmic scenarios that have no complete predictable parameters, so some failures and breakdowns are not only to be expected, they are forgivable. However, a vacancy on the United States Supreme Court is not a runaway stagecoach with a woman on board. It is a well-established Constitutional duty enumerated by our founding fathers. A president can start weighing the “what ifs” from January 20th of his first day in office, and ruminate every day until the day arrives that he may have to activate his Constitutional authority.
Thus, with a well-established roster of conservatives to pick from, Bush hands us a Rorschach blot and asks to “stare at it for a while.” I’m not into playing this game, no matter how it ultimately turns out.
But let’s go ahead and examine the one thing we do know about her. She’s a lawyer. That makes me feel better. Jonnie Cochran was a lawyer. Lawyers are very much like prostitutes. They perform whatever duties they are paid to perform, and usually with great experience. Lawyers and hookers are both subject to their employers’ demands.
What I want to know is, does Harriet Miers dress like a republican because she’s been paid to do so?
Judges, on the other hand answer to no one, except for God, and they’ve done a good job of overturning Him anyway. That kind of autonomy is not only rare, it does not deserve to go to the ideologically androgynous. It deserves to go to someone with an established record, liberal or conservative.
So what George Bush has managed to do is sap the momentum from his own base, because many of us are now forced to expend our energy to defeat this nomination, just to hope and pray that he does the right thing the second time around.
This is problematic, because now we are forced to try to convince enough timorous republicans not to vote for her. Oddly enough, we might fail because the democrats could deliver enough votes for her. The other problem stems from a divide amongst those that want to trust presdient Bush and those of us that don't. Chances are that real and present divide will most likely see Harriet Miers confirmed.
This presidency has, and has always been about the court. One man stands with the gun to the head of years of liberal judicial activism, and he’s decided to chamber only one bullet and spin the cylinder.
All we wanted was the other five bullets, and in that area, he has failed to do so.
Related: Steve has a another view on the matter here.
And John's got . . . well, something.
posted by Doofus @ 6:48 AM
<< Home