10 06 05

The wailing! The gnashing! The rending of garments! If the conservative reaction to Harriet Miers is any indication, Bush has no chance of winning a third term. The decision to appoint a relative unknown – or, given her proximity to the Bush inner circle, an unknown relative – has caused many on the right to open a vein and the let the despair flow out into the warm bath of misery, disappointment, and overextended metaphors. Why didn’t Bush clone Scalia in a dish and appoint him? Here, use some stem cells if you have to. Anyone but another Souter!

That’s the great fear on the right: Souterism. A mild-mannered cipher appointed by a Bush who dons the black robe and promptly starts to eat babies. Souter! How many times have you opened the door at Halloween and seen his face on a child’s mask? How many times have you waited in the doctor’s office, clammy with dread, waiting for him to slap the X-rays up on the wall and point to a grayish souter-shaped mass? Miers could turn out to be the conservative’s worst nightmare. She could regard the Constitution as a living document, still in its first trimester. She could, at this very moment, be in the attic assembling the shortwave she got while a member of the Resistance in Texas, dialing in Steinham One to report total success, repeat total success.

Or not.

Keep one thing in mind: Souter was nominated by Bush 41, who stood for genial, ideologically indifferent governance by the Establishment. Bush 43, we’re constantly told by his opponents, is so besotted by neocon ideology he cannot blow his nose without calling Wolfowitz and asking if it’s okay to touch his left nostril. He would nominate a squishy cipher? Maybe. Let’s look at the reasons he might nominate a moderate:

1. E-Z no-sweat confirmation. Everyone’s still resting up from those brutal Roberts hearings, right? There still must be a quart of Chuck Schumer’s blood on the walls. Perhaps the administration feared that a controversial nomination would trigger the nuclear option and force them to act like they have the majority, something they regard as a dirty secret best not aired in public.

There will be attacks, but they’ll be mild. Usually criticism of a professional woman would the tar the critic as gynophobic sexist, but in the case of conservative women you can attack all you like, because conservative women have to give up their uteruses to join the party. Totally true, dude. There’s this big ritual in front of a giant owl and everything.

2. Because Bush was weakened by Katrina. By this logic, the failure of the administration to prevent nonexistent murders in the Superdome means he must nominate someone who’s pro-choice. If the storm had veered ten miles to the west, he would have been permitted to nominate someone pro-choice who disapproved of partial-birth abortion unless the life of the mother was endangered, and the storm had been downgraded to a Cat 3 by landfall.

3. Because Bush isn’t really conservative. His positions on immigration, spending and campaign-finance laws notwithstanding.
Or perhaps she’s not squishy. Perhaps Bush knows and trusts Miers to reflect his philosophy, and thinks this is the right choice despite what the headlines of the day happen to say. A wildly implausible idea! But it could be true.

It shouldn’t bother anyone that she gave money to the Gore campaign. As Sen. Feinstein reminded us, compassion and pity are just the qualities we want in a jurist. And it shouldn’t bother the administration that hard-core conservative pundits aren’t happy. They’re never happy nowadays. These were the people who caught a whiff of Souterism in John Robert’s nomination, and wouldn’t be happy unless a nominee announced his intention to back Souter into a corner in the cloakroom and give him a turbo-wedgie every day. Yes, the base would be happier if the Republicans acted like a party that had won all the elections, and pursued its agenda as unapologetically and brazenly as some accuse. But what does one expect? The operative word in that sentence is “Republicans,” the party that dare not speak its own name.

If it’s pronounced Conservative, that is.




(perm link.)