October 26, 2005

Organizing Against Miers

David Frum started up Americans for Better Justice to oppose the Harriet Miers nomination. Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, and Virginia Postrel are all on board.

They already have a commercial. The tone is good. They're not bashing the President or Miers supporters. This has the potential of really being a full-blown conservative schism. A lot will up to how Miers supporters like Hugh Hewitt respond. It's not a good sign when Hewitt writes,

The echo-chamber effect that plagued the Michael Moore Democrats last year may now be at work among conservative intellectuals who think they are seeing a rising, when in fact they are witnessing the equivalent of a cyber faculty meeting meltdown over a tenure decision, on steroids.

Pejman Yousefzadeh has jumped off the fence and opposes Miers:

So even if Harriet Miers passes through the prelude, what do we have? We have a very smart litigator who would be--and was--a very good managing partner at a large law firm who has not thought seriously about Constitutional law, issues of statutory jurisprudence or an overarching theory of jurisprudence. She will cram for her immediate hurdle before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But that is not enough to prepare her for a lifetime on the Court. For John Roberts, the Senate hearings were an occasion to show clearly to the very few who remained foolish enough to doubt him his absolute and awe-inspiring mastery of Constitutional law. For Harriet Miers, they would be an occasion to merely attain some semblance of respectability after an underwhelming rollout--underwhelming in large part because of her failure to impress even those whose own legal training is shallow at best.

And this is where I get off the bus. I don't want a Justice who is merely better than the mediocre. I want excellence. I want someone who lives and breathes the issues the Court grapples with and while Harriet Miers is an excellent lawyer, she does not fit the bill on this score.

UPDATE: Stephen Taylor takes Hewitt to task for his characterization of the anti-Miers crowd as East Coast elites.