Category Archives: Law: The Supremes

As predicted here more than a week ago, the White House withdrew the Miers nomination. So now we can speculate as to who’s next, and whether it will be such an awful nomination that it will be filibustered. The first question is whether, having named a woman the first time, the White House can get away with replacing her with a man — suggesting that in its eyes no women are up to the job. As far as I know, however, all of the leading women candidates are rather extreme, and thus filibuster bait.

Perhaps it depends on the number and nature of whatever indictments we get tomorrow, and what it does to the White House’s political power?

Brad DeLong has decided he is For Harriet Miers on the devil-you-know theory. Too late, though, she’s not just sinking, sinking, it’s gotten to the point that Miers is toast.

Then again, if we get enough endorsements, maybe we don’t have to forgo the hearings? I look forward to the meticulous replies.

Which is not to say that the devil-you-know theory is a bad one: If the Nixon pattern holds, we’ll get someone much worse next time, just to punish us.

In and of itself it’s more a technical error than a smoking gun, but in context this seems part of a pattern of carelessness:

Page A-26: Can you believe it? … unidentified low-level sources have revealed to Page A-26 that Harriet Miers did not provide a complete work history in her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire.

Sources indicate that Ms. Miers failed to mention her tenure as a member of the Martindale-Hubbell/Lexis-Nexis Legal Advisory Board.

I understand how a busy person might honestly forget even something fairly substantial such as a Board membership. I remember how much trouble I had documenting my life when I had to apply for a security clearance, and I was only 28 at the time. But that is why any well-organized person keeps their c.v. up to date — it’s a way to make sure you have a record of everything you’ve done should you ever need one. I try to update mine at least once a year. (Hmm… looks like it’s time to update it again….)

Given that one of the major talking points for Miers has been how ‘meticulous’ she is, the drip drip drip of sloppy mistakes that might well be ignored for a different nominee will in this case continue to erode her rapidly shrinking prospects.

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.

Think Progress » BREAKING: Miers Also Suspended from Texas Bar

I’m a little sorry to see the Harriet Miers nomination sink so fast. I would have preferred it sink slowly. Very slowly. And indeed, I might have preferred it not sink at all: if we’re going to have a nominee from the GW Bush stable, better to have a sixty-year-old lightweight with some vaguely moderate items in her history than some forty-five-year-old firebrand with heavy-duty intellectual firepower. Or even a sixty-year-old firebrand.

Getting suspended from one bar, briefly, for non-payment of dues was sloppy but a little easier to excuse than the multi-year, and seemingly knowing, defaults of DC Circuit nominee and now Judge Thomas B. Griffith. Doing it twice, well, it’s not very meticulous, is it?

I know the poll numbers so far haven’t supported the neo-con pileon, but give Letterman and Leno a week or two, and I’m afraid Miers is probably toast.