Trust me, about Iraq also

I have a couple things to point out today and then I’m going to have to watch some baseball.

I’ve said many times on here that one of my favorite op-ed columnists is conservative George Will (he loves baseball). Often times after reading his work I feel so dumb. He has a style and a vocabulary that with this blog world is considered rare and vanishing fast. The Political Heretic, who is also linking to Will’s newest Washington Post op-ed, does the best job that I’ve seen on these blogs of emulating the preciseness that Will has mastered.

Will hits hard with his latest piece and labels President Bush’s choice of Harriet Miers as unjustifiable and calls for her rejection by the Senate.

“He [Bush] has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.”

If the president doesn’t have Will, then he doesn’t have that true conservative base anymore. And I’m not talking about the far right wing neocon Christian wacko base either. I’m talking about the true progressive conservative almost Reagan-like base.

“Furthermore, there is no reason to believe that Miers's nomination resulted from the president's careful consultation with people capable of such judgments. If 100 such people had been asked to list 100 individuals who have given evidence of the reflectiveness and excellence requisite in a justice, Miers's name probably would not have appeared in any of the 10,000 places on those lists.”

And maybe the harshest statement I’ve heard yet from a conservative about Bush and his incompetence:

“In addition, the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution.”

Harsh indeed.

Will concludes with:

“It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.”

I’ll let the Political Heretic close it out, cause he does it so much better:

“Again I have to agree with Mr. Will and in fact said as much on The Political Notio. She has to prove, before the senators, that she has a sound legal mind that won't succumb to the reasoning. Liberals should fear this because, as an evangelical conservative, she may, without a train of thought of her own, acquiesce to the reasoning employed by those she would like to identify with most - Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Conservatives have to wonder what she will do when Scalia, Thomas, and Roberts disagree on a given issue (and Scalia and Thomas have disagreed on occasion). What reasoning would she use or would she arbitrarily decide each case based upon her own ideological preferences? I'd really like to know if she has the brain of a justice.”

Onto Iraq

Much like with Iraq, Bush is using his “trust me,” take my word for it and don’t ask questions persona with Harriet Miers. With Iraq that trust ended a long time ago for non-Bush supporters, and now with Miers that trust appears to be ending for the conservatives as well, and maybe even into Iraq.

But something in the news that isn’t getting a lot of attention is the Iraqi vote rules change. I suppose today it was changed back to the original rule that the Iraqi constitution can be rejected by a two-thirds "no" vote in three provinces, even if the charter wins majority approval nationwide. On Sunday the rules were changed to allow only a simple majority (50+1, yes Bush calls that a mandate) to ratify the new constitution. After pleads from the UN and the US that the new rules would outrage the Sunni minority resulting in another boycott, the Iraqi ruling parliament changed the rules back to the original, thus granting the Sunnis a large and powerful voice in the upcoming Oct. 15th elections. I’m glad the rules were changed back. As we know from our own constitutional experiment, Government of the People does comprise minorities as well.

Tags:
Harriet Miers, George Will, All the President's Women, Can This Nomination Be Justified?, The Heart of the Matter, ning