Slowly Shaking My Head
Now Playing: "The Closer I Get to You" by Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway
President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers continues not only to baffle the hell out of me, but also to annoy me.

No matter what the causes or effects of this nomination are, we already know that Miers is neither a well-known Constitutional scholar nor a highly-regarded jurist. We have plenty of those of every color, gender, and ideological affiliation ---but she is not one of them.

Instead, she is someone whom the President knows and trusts very well. Which is important and necessary in its own context. But to say that she will approach her duties as a strict constructionist and that she is the best person for the job he could find and that we just have to get to know her to realize how able she would be on the Supreme Court of the United States is to say that her ass is the property of the man who puts her on that bench. And that is not judicial independence. That does not in any way meet the standard that we should expect of our highest court.

Okay, so a lot of our Justices over the centuries have not been judges first. Which, I will accept, is something that might give the Supreme Court a more ideologically diverse character than if it only consisted of graduates from the appellate cloisters. But this nomination smacks of cronyism in a very big way and I will not support it unless, somehow, Miss Miers just comes out and impresses the hell out of me.

So, for the first time in a long time, the confirmation hearings for a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States will prove valuable. We should at least be glad of that.