Harriet Miers: A well-qualified nominee

Intellectual giants of the Court.

Harriet Miers:

"[Miers] also found [Governor Bush] 'cool,' [and] said he and his wife, Laura, were 'the greatest!'"

..."Ms. Miers wrote to thank the Bushes, saying,'Texas has a very popular governor and first lady!'"

..."Ms. Miers wrote to thank [Bush] 'for taking the time to visit in the office and on the plane back - cool!'"

Antonin Scalia:

"If you think aficionados of a living Constitution want to bring you flexibility, think again. You think the death penalty is a good idea? Persuade your fellow citizens to adopt it. You want a right to abortion? Persuade your fellow citizens and enact it. That's flexibility."

"The Freedom of Information Act is the Taj Mahal of the Doctrine of Unanticipated Consequences, the Sistine Chapel of Cost-Benefit Analysis Ignored."

"There is nothing new in the realization that the Constitution sometimes insulates the criminality of a few in order to protect the privacy of us all."

Update 10/11: You can view some of the correspondence between Bush and Miers here.

Comments

[Steven Taylor]

*sigh*

[Bryan]

I don't get it.

I mean, I get the first quote is supposed to make Miers look stupid, but how does it relate to the 3 by Scalia?

And, BTW, you might want to be clearer those are three seperate quotes by Scalia and not one long muddled one.

[Michael Koplow]

Imagine some pundit had written this while Spinsanity was in business. Someone--maybe Brendan Nyhan--would probably point out that this silly hatchet job is full of quotes that have nothing to do with intellectual gigantism or with serving on a court, and that we could probably find quotations like these from almost anyone.

I don't object to BN being partisan, esp. since his partisanism is pretty much the same as mine. I object to his pretending that this is political analysis.

I'm very disappointed.

[Michael Koplow]

Who cares? What do the Miers quotes have to do with intellectual gigantism? Or with whether she's a well-qualified nominee? She talks informally when she's off duty. BFD.

If some pundit had come up with this back when Spinsanity was in business, I wonder whether BN and his colleagues would have held it up as an example of useful discourse.

I'm very disappointed.