Trust me ...

Last week, Mr. Warren wrote a scathing and pretty snarky column "Bush's Bad Choice", denouncing W.'s choice for SCOTUS.

"I've always loved the name Harriet, or "Hattie" for short. To me, the name evokes some sweet, willowy thing in red hair and freckles, with lively observant eyes, a whimsical self-deprecating wit and a streak of harmless sentimentality, alert alike to charity and danger. I don't know why. I've never met a Harriet."

[...]

"But why am I bothering my reader with such Harrietine musings? Because that is about all anyone knew, about Harriet E. Miers, when President George W. Bush nominated her to the U.S. Supreme Court. Her name. And that she's a close friend of Laura Bush, which is alarming."

[...]

"But Ms. O'Connor made decisions (such as her celebrated ruling on gerrymanders) akin to the stereotype of a woman shopping."

[...]

"The best thing I've heard about Ms. Miers is that Nathan Hecht, the least ambiguously conservative member of the Texas Supreme Court, thinks she will do. Notwithstanding, were I a liberal Democrat, I would be in a rush to confirm this appointment.

Politically, I would say, a disaster. President Bush has telegraphed his weakness to his enemies ("not spoiling for a fight," as The New York Times gloated), and shaken the confidence of his allies. The John Roberts appointment was already a slide -- a smooth, competent, legal technocrat as Chief Justice, not a man of deep convictions. It's a war, and convictions are not optional."

There's more, but, that was the gist of it.

To his credit, Mr. Warren is backtracking this week. I shall boldly note that Mr. Warren has humbly acknowledged that the US Constitution places trust with the people to decide their fate.

David Warren writing in the Ottawa Citizen (subscription required)

Today, instead of my usual two cents' worth, the reader gets two single-penny columns. I wanted to subtract from what I said last week on President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court.

In the week since, much dust has settled, and it has become clear that Ms. Miers is acceptable to the broad right-wing Republican constituency, and to not a few Democrats. She is despised, chiefly, by the right-wing intellectuals (people like me), who were heartbroken that Mr. Bush would pass over the long list of brilliant, strict-constructionist legal scholars that have arisen in response to the challenge presented by two generations of often deconstructionist rulings by the same Supreme Court.

Especially, that he should do so to appoint some woman who was his own personal lawyer and who looks at first glance as if she could be -- on the grand constitutional issues, outside her own territory of corporate law -- a ditz.

(A strict "constructionist" is an interpreter who reads the U.S. Constitution as if it were written in plain English, which it was. A "deconstructionist" is my cute attempt to label judges who prefer to rewrite the Constitution as they go along -- in the U.S. case, mostly by riffing on the 14th Amendment.)

While I'm not sure we right-wing elitists were wrong, I hope we were, and without speaking for anyone else, I'm beginning to think I was wrong.

If Ms. Miers clears the U.S. Senate, we will see what sort of judge she'll be.

But for now, President Bush's apparently weak argument, "Trust me," is beginning to look much sounder. Perhaps the great Texas jurisprude Lino Graglia put this best in an interview with Hugh Hewitt. To paraphrase: the Supremes are in the habit of arrogating to themselves decisions that should really be made by the people (on everything from abortion, pornography, and school prayer, to all-male military academies in the State of Virginia). Power naturally flows to their heads. Yet the Constitution had nothing to say about such things, and explicitly left to the people what it had nothing to say about. It is this trust in the people that has made America the beacon she is.

Harriet Miers may be exactly the sort of real-world type who can understand that. George Bush, from knowing her well over a long time, is in a good position to know she knows. She doesn't need bells, whistles and law degrees from Harvard and Yale. It might even help not to have them.