Stinging Miers Rebuke

Taranto devotes all of today’s Best of the Web to a look at her testimony as a member of the Dallas City Council in Williams v. Dallas, a voting-rights case from 1989.

It is not shades of Robert Bork, it does not substantiate the President's promises of justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. It looks like a Kennedy or an O'Connor, if not a possible Souter.

It's hard to see the "church lady" overturning Raich, and part of the testimony portends poorly for Kelo:

Miers didn't directly address the question of eminent domain. But she described a tour of a South Dallas community in which the homes were not to her liking:

The construction of housing that was large in number, close together, close to the street where there wasn't a place for children to play or really just seemed so compact that it didn't seem like it was planned properly to provide the kind of environment where people could really exist and have much of an existence.

The expansion of eminent domain that led eventually to Kelo came about because the court in decades past decided that combating "urban blight" was a "public use" for which the government could confiscate private property. Miers's rather condescending thought that people in small, densely packed homes don't "have much of an existence" leads one to wonder if, were she on the Supreme Court, she would respect the property rights of those South Dallas residents or others similarly situated.

No word on where she stands on the infield fly-rule or the DH.

SCOTUS Posted by John Kranz at October 13, 2005 4:08 PM