[Mb-civic] Hypocrisy and The Miers Case - Mark Shields - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Hypocrisy and The Miers Case

By Mark Shields
Sunday, October 30, 2005; Page B07

One reason I like people who run for political office is that, unlike 
most of us who go to great lengths to avoid even the slightest snub, 
candidates willingly risk very public rejection.

When you choose to run for office, you know that anyone you ever sat 
next to in high school homeroom or double-dated with or carpooled with 
will know whether you won or (more likely) lost.

Harriet Miers, after withdrawing as a nominee to be a Supreme Court 
justice, knows as well as Al Gore or John Kerry or Bob Dole how publicly 
painful and painfully public rejection can be.

As John R. Tunis once wrote, "Losing is the great American sin." But 
Miers, who is undoubtedly a hurting victim in this whole melodrama and 
deserving of compassion and kindness, is not the loser. No, the losers 
are those mostly conservative posturers and pretenders who now stand 
exposed as political hypocrites.

Who said repeatedly some variation of "every judicial nominee and the 
American people and the president deserve a fair up-or-down vote?" If 
you answered virtually every Republican senator, especially Sens. Orrin 
Hatch of Utah, Sam Brownback of Kansas and Bill Frist of Tennessee, you 
would be more than right.

In addition to that "up-or-down vote," every judicial nominee, according 
to those same honorable folks, was entitled to a fair committee hearing. 
Every judicial nominee, it turns out, except Miers. She didn't even get 
the hearing, let alone "the fair up-or-down vote" she deserved.

One clause in Article VI of the Constitution states, "No religious test 
shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust 
under the United States." So, when some quarrelsome Senate Democrats 
kept asking if and how John Roberts' Catholicism might influence his 
opinions, the Bush White House turned away such impertinence with a 
prepared statement: "Judge Roberts has said in previous testimony that 
personal beliefs or views have no role whatsoever when it comes to 
decisions judges make." In other words, butt out!

But by October, the no-questions-about-a-nominee's-religious-faith rule 
had been conveniently repealed so that President Bush, facing "people 
[who] ask me why I picked Harriet Miers," could answer, "Part of Harriet 
Miers' life is her religion," while Karl Rove, the man whom Bush calls 
"Boy Genius," would personally reassure James Dobson, a powerful leader 
of the religious right, that Miers was "an evangelical Christian" and a 
member of "a very conservative church which is almost universally 
pro-life." Religious faith had become a reference and a credential for 
high office.

"If we're going to give advice and consent, we've got to have a full 
picture," Brownback said. "We were not asking for documents regarding 
attorney-client privilege -- or privileged communications," he told CNN. 
"We were saying, 'Show us some documents of policy issues discussion' so 
we could get some framework of her policy views."

The Senate is not a rubber stamp, Brownback announced. But Republicans, 
including Brownback, had scorned and rejected Senate Democrats' requests 
for similar work from Roberts's time in the White House.

Of course, all conservatives and most Republicans are fiercely opposed 
to all quotas -- whether based on race, religion, gender or ethnicity. 
But Miers, as you may have noticed, was nominated to the seat long held 
by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. Maybe it's just a coincidence that 
neither is a man. But Bush kept emphasizing Miers' achievements with a 
strong gender twist, as the first woman to be president of the Texas bar 
and the first woman to be managing partner of a big Texas law firm. Not 
that this was intended to be the woman's seat on the court, because 
conservatives abhor quotas.

Miers does not need to apologize to anyone. She told no lies. The big 
losers are those on the political right -- both her supporters and her 
opponents -- whose contradictions and moral relativism were enough to 
give hypocrisy a bad name.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/28/AR2005102801721.html?nav=hcmodule
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