Best of the Web Today - October 10, 2005
By JAMES TARANTO
Don't Be a Stranger
NEW YORK--Saturday night found us at the Columbus Citizens Foundation's annual gala at the Waldorf-Astoria, which was preceded by an unusual event: an on-the-record press conference by a sitting Supreme Court justice. Antonin Scalia, grand marshal of this year's Columbus Day Parade, had stipulated that he wouldn't answer any questions about the court, but that didn't stop the reporters from asking them. And without meaning to, he did end up saying something revealing about Harriet Miers, President Bush's nominee to replace Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.
A reporter from the New York Observer asked Scalia if he had met Miers. He had not, he said. "What is your impression of her?," the reporter then asked, a follow-up Scalia deflected with ease: "Never having met her, I have no impression of her."
The gregarious Scalia is a fixture on Washington's social circuit, especially among conservative lawyers. If Miers has never met him, that is an indication of how much of an outsider she is, and it helps explain why those who have labored for decades in the service of restoring constitutional jurisprudence to something resembling the actual Constitution--building both an intellectual foundation and a community of prospective judges who adhere to this approach--are so demoralized and angry at the selection.
To be sure, being an outsider does not necessarily mean she is unqualified to serve on the court, a point many of our readers made forcefully in response to Friday's item on the hostility to the Miers nomination we encountered at the National Review dinner (a sampling of the response is here). One doesn't have to be in the Federalist Society's orbit to be a brilliant jurist.
But one sign the nomination may be in trouble is that its defenders seem to be conceding that Miers is not a brilliant jurist. Saturday's New York Times quotes former senator Dan Coats, "who has been asked by the White House to shepherd Ms. Miers through the Senate confirmation process":
"If great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole," Mr. Coats said in a CNN interview.
[Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen] Specter, asked about that remark, laughed and wondered if it was "another Hruska quote"--a reference to an oft-quoted comment by the late Roman Hruska, a Republican senator from Nebraska, who defended G. Harrold Carswell, a Supreme Court nominee who was rejected by the Senate. "Even if he is mediocre," Mr. Hruska said, "there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren't they, and a little chance?"
Mediocre people are, of course, entitled to representation. That's what Congress is for. But the federal courts are not a representative institution, and the charge of elitism is a strange one in this context. After all, it's called the Supreme Court, not the Court of Common Place.
Under My Thumb
Does anyone else detect a whiff of sexism in some of the defenses of the Miers nomination? "I'll make a prediction for you," Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, offered yesterday on "Meet the Press": "When she's confirmed, over the next five years, she and John Roberts will disagree about 1% of the time." He was so proud of this prediction that he repeated it later in the show.
Is Land suggesting that Miers, who would be the most junior member of the court and who has never served as a judge, will be such an intellectual force that she would persuade the chief to vote her way 99% of the time? Unlikely. Rather, Land seems to be casting Miers in a submissive role, as a sort of Stepford justice.
It is, as we noted Friday, reminiscent of the left's racist caricature of Clarence Thomas as Antonin Scalia's puppet. As this chart shows, Thomas and Scalia were in full agreement in only 68% of cases in the 2004-05 term; the two justices who most often agreed fully, William Rehnquist and Anthony Kennedy, did so 77% of the time.
A 99% agreement rate over five years would be so far off the charts statistically that Land's description of a Justice Miers probably will turn out to be as unfair and inaccurate as the liberal lie about Thomas. But would anyone dare suggest that Edith Jones or Janice Rogers Brown would not think for herself if she were on the court--much less present this as an argument in her favor?
Miers Deniers
Two days before Harriet Miers's nomination, we argued in The Wall Street Journal that President Bush shouldn't have much trouble getting a nominee confirmed:
After all, Republicans hold a majority in the Senate. Not since LBJ's abortive elevation of Justice Abe Fortas to chief 37 years ago has a Supreme Court nominee faced a serious challenge in a Senate controlled by the president's party.
Yet the Fortas precedent may turn out to be relevant here. As Boyden Gray noted in 2003, Fortas's nomination in 1968 was sunk by a coalition of Democrats who opposed it for ideological reasons and Republicans who objected to LBJ's appointing his crony as chief justice. Sound familiar? (In fairness to Miers, she, unlike Fortas, does not stand accused of any ethical improprieties.)
The Washington Times reports that "nearly half of Senate Republicans say they remain unconvinced that Harriet Miers is worthy of being confirmed to the Supreme Court":
27 Republican senators--almost half of [the] party's members in the chamber--have publicly expressed specific doubts about Miss Miers or said they must withhold any support whatsoever for her nomination until after the hearings.
Meanwhile, the White House's effort to reassure conservatives may give Democrats a reason to oppose the nomination:
James Dobson--founder of Colorado-based Focus on the Family and an influential social conservative--endorsed Miss Miers after a conversation with Bush political strategist Karl Rove. Such conversations have raised concerns that the White House is making assurances as to how Miss Miers would rule on certain cases--a situation that many think would compromise her independence if she was confirmed to the court.
"If anybody . . . wants to be on the Supreme Court or any court and are going to get that appointment based on assurances of how he or she would vote, they're not qualified to be on that court," said Vermont Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the top Democrat on the Judiciary panel.
Twenty-two Democrats, Leahy not among them, voted against John Roberts, and it would be awfully strange for them to vote for a nominee whose selling point is that she would be a virtual Roberts clone. Do the arithmetic: 27 doubting Republicans plus 22 bitter-ender Democrats plus the senior senator from Vermont adds up to 50 senators. Anyone still think she's a shoo-in?
We're All Neocons Now
Blogger Frank LoPinto calls our attention to a news item from Friday that got lost amid the Miers mania. From the Associated Press:
The Senate voted Friday to give President Bush $50 billion more for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and U.S. military efforts against terrorism, money that would push total spending for the operations beyond $350 billion.
In a 97-0 vote, the GOP-controlled Senate signed off on the money as part of a $445 billion military spending bill for the budget year that began Oct. 1.
Two years ago the Senate voted 87-12 in favor of an $87 billion supplemental appropriation for security and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the 12 senators who voted "no" then, nine are still in the Senate, and eight of them voted "yes" on Friday. (Vemont's Pat Leahy was AWOL.) Argues LoPinto:
[This] tells us that members of the Senate have done the political calculus and have determined that the majority of their constituencies support finishing the job in Iraq even if some portion of them did not support the invasion. . . .
A consensus has been reached by the people of America, the Congress, the President and even al Qaeda that the War in Iraq is key. And only victory matters.
Fascist fishwife Cindy Sheehan fast approaching Minute 17 and sounding loonier by the day: "George and friends have come up with a new enemy whose atrocities also can't be contained to borders and that doesn't wear a national uniform: The Bird Flu." (If she had any wit, she'd call him a chicken hawk.) Thus it seems clear that there is no "antiwar" movement in America, except in the imaginations of activists and journalists who are fixated on the Vietnam* era.
* Where by the way John Kerry** served.
** Whose wife*** now calls herself "Teresa Heinz."
*** The outspoken ketchup heiress and philanthropist.
Big Brother Bombs
No one much cares about Freddy Ferrer, the Democrats' sacrificial candidate for mayor of New York City, but this article from the New York Times caught our attention for a tangential reason:
A prominent opponent of the death penalty criticized Fernando Ferrer yesterday for saying that capital punishment was justified in some cases, the latest of several positions that the Democratic candidate for mayor has taken on the issue.
"After 10 years of experience with the death penalty, New Yorkers have rethought their position on the issue, and Mr. Ferrer should, too," said David Kaczynski, executive director of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, which was influential in virtually scuttling the state's death penalty law this year. "We would welcome the opportunity to sit down with Mr. Ferrer to help him sort through the various issues."
The rebuke by Mr. Kaczynski, who lives upstate and is not backing any candidate in the mayor's race, was a source of considerable frustration for Mr. Ferrer's aides yesterday. Mr. Ferrer made the remark Thursday night at a televised debate, which Ferrer aides had hoped to declare a clean victory for the Democrat and a defeat for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who had been criticized for skipping the event.
Kaczynski . . . Kaczynski . . . hmm, does that name ring a bell? Why yes, David Kaczynski is the younger brother of Ted "Unabomber" Kaczynski, who murdered three people and wounded 23. This might have been relevant to mention in a story about his efforts regarding criminal justice, but the Times did not do so.
Homer Nods
Jacquelyn Sherman, who hit a $1.6 million jackpot on a "Wheel of Fortune" slot machine, apparently was not betting $20 a pull, as we suggested in an item Friday. We haven't been in a casino for a few years, so we forgot that slot machines accept folding money, up to $100 bills. It appears from this page that Sherman was betting 75 cents a pull on a quarter slot.
And You Thought He Was Just the First Black President
"Clinton Inducted Into Women's Hall of Fame"--headline, CNN.com, Oct. 9
What Would We Do Without Experts?--I
"Experts Worry More Rain Could Cause More Flooding"--headline, Union Leader (Manchester, N.H.), Oct. 10
What Would We Do Without Experts?--II
"Experts: Don't Risk Lives for Cheap Heat"--headline, Times Leader (Wilkes Barre, Pa.), Oct. 10
Bye-Bye, Porter!
"Porter Goss Makes Changes, Waves at CIA"--headline, Associated Press, Oct. 8
Shell Those Smurfs!
London's Daily Telegraph reports that Unicef has produced an "adult-only episode of 'The Smurfs.' " But this isn't a blue movie; rather, it depicts a mass smurficide:
It opens with the Smurfs dancing, hand in hand, around a campfire and singing the Smurf song. Bluebirds flutter past and rabbits gambol around their familiar village of mushroom-shaped houses until, without warning, bombs begin to rain from the sky.
The Smurfs scatter and run in vain from the whistling bombs, before being felled by blast waves and fiery explosions. The final scene shows a scorched and tattered Baby Smurf sobbing inconsolably, surrounded by prone Smurfs.
The final frame bears the message: "Don't let war affect the lives of children."
Perversely, this film was shown on TV in Belgium, apparently with the idea of stirring up sympathy for the infuriatingly cloying figments--notwithstanding the Smurfs' history of aggression against Belgium. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that but for American blood and treasure, the Belgians would be speaking Smurfish today instead of Belch. This is no laughing matter, as Smurf.com notes:
The Smurfs speak a very strange language. Some words are replaced by "Smurf," as well as some of the verbs. Instead of saying, "I caught a cold in the nose," they would say, "I smurfed a smurf in the nose."
No wonder the Belgians are known as smurf-smurfing surrender smurfs.
Frappe in the Case
"Media giant Reuters is facing two more tawdry and potentially costly accusations of bias," the New York Post reports. Here's the one that caught our attention:
Wenping Tu, a former staffer at subsidiary Loan Pricing Corp. seeks $10 million, claiming she was subjected to racial discrimination and sexual harassment by her boss, leading her to miscarry.
Tu, 37, filed suit in Manhattan State Supreme Court in March, claiming Haresh Sabnani repeatedly expressed "disgust and disdain" for Chinese people. He referred to Tu--who has an MBA--as "cheap labor," she alleges.
He also referred "to his seminal fluid [as] 'milkshake,' " she claims.
He even used scare quotes! Maybe now Reuters will reconsider its relentlessly relativistic editorial policy. One man's terrorist may be another man's freedom fighter, but yet another man's milkshake is one woman's eight-figure lawsuit. |
