October 19, 2005
Harsh Medicine
Robert Bork offers some harsh medicine to President Bush today in a guest editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Slouching Toward Miers
He sets the tone early:
With a single stroke--the nomination of Harriet Miers--the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That's not a bad day's work--for liberals.
And Mr. Bork doesn't ameliorate much from there:
By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of "Don't ask, don't tell" admonition to would-be judges. It is a blow in particular to the Federalist Society, most of whose members endorse originalism. The society, unlike the ACLU, takes no public positions, engages in no litigation, and includes people of differing views in its programs. It performs the invaluable function of making law students, in the heavily left-leaning schools, aware that there are respectable perspectives on law other than liberal activism. Yet the society has been defamed in McCarthyite fashion by liberals; and it appears to have been important to the White House that neither the new chief justice nor Ms. Miers had much to do with the Federalists.
He claims that the President like his father "is showing himself to be indifferent, if not actively hostile, to conservative values."
I still think it is too late to pull this nomination, I just wanted to grouse a bit.
This is the most serious opposition I have seen. National Review, and even Kristol are taken seriously but thought to have other motives. Robert Bork is every conservative's idea of the perfect Supreme Court justice. This will take its toll.