Not only did Miers get suspended from practicing law not once, but twice — twice! (surely well aheard of the previous record for any nominee to the Supreme Court?) — but it seems, via Yahoo! News, that she is not so meticulous about filling out other forms either: Miers omitted prior business interest on Senate questionnaire (alt link direct to Chicago Tribune).
It is amazing when I am in substantial agreement with a Robert Novak column on anything, but there it is.
“The tipping point in Washington is when you go from being a subject of caricature to the subject of laughter. She’s in danger of becoming the subject of laughter.” —Bruce Fein, quoted in Newsweek.
How long before the nominator too becomes subject to the ridicule he deserves? Maybe not until he leaves, or is hounded from, office: the problem that the damage being done to this country just isn’t funny.
I tend to agree she’s done for, but her manifest unfitness for this position makes me wonder if nominating her wasn’t just a diversion. What from? Well, isn’t there a slew of new regulation implementations like the one that opens up drilling on federal oil lands? Ordinarily that might get lots of publicity. Now it’s lost in the haze.
Of course there’s plenty of other haze around the White House these days. And if it was meant as a diversion, I have to grant that it would look like too clever by half, cutting off your nose to spite your face, or whatever you want to call it; strange that they wouldn’t see just how deeply this would upset the religious voting base that they’ve been mobilizing for almost a decade by getting them revved up about “judicial activism.”
It did follow very much in the pattern of picking Cheney as VP– tap the person responsible for vetting everyone else.
Ultimately I’m at a loss to decide just what this nomination signified– a diversion designed to lose or to be muscled through anyway, an attempted sleight of hand by finessing the issues everyone expected (wink, wink), a reversion to characteristic patterns in times of stress and disarray, a complete botch, just what.
Someone– I can’t recall now who– pointed out that the shabbiest aspect of this whole mess is what bush did to Miers personally, shoving forward this abjectly loyal staffer for something she’s so obviously unqualified for and didn’t want. I can only agree.