Daily Archives: October 23, 2005

Are You Experienced?

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Oh, my. Some people do sound a tad shrill.

Looks like Steve Clemons’s interview with Brent Scowcroft in the October 31 issue of the New Yorker (article not online, but the issue goes on sale tomorrow) is going to be a must-read. You can find excerpts at the links above. I want to mention this paragraph in particular:

Like nearly everyone else in Washington, Scowcroft believed that Saddam maintained stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, but he wrote that a strong inspections program would have kept him at bay. “There may have come a time when we would have needed to take Saddam out,” he told me. “But he wasn’t really a threat. His Army was weak, and the country hadn’t recovered from sanctions.” Scowcroft’s colleagues told me that he would have preferred to deliver his analysis privately to the White House. But Scowcroft, the apotheosis of a Washington insider, was by then definitively on the outside, and there was no one in the White House who would listen to him. On the face of it, this is remarkable: Scowcroft’s best friend’s son is the President; his friend Dick Cheney is the Vice-President; Condoleezza Rice, who was the national-security adviser, and is now the Secretary of State, was once a Scowcroft protege; and the current national-security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is another protege and a former principal at the Scowcroft Group.

Now, this is exactly what I thought about Saddam Hussein before the invasion. Many’s the time before the invasion I had this exchange with a rightie:

Rightie: You looney lefties would just leave Saddam in charge of Iraq.

Me: Well, yes. I think he’s contained. And what’s he gonna do with UN weapons inspectors running all over the place, poking into things?

Rightie: You leftie idiots don’t know anything. You are so naive.

Yes, I may be naive. I have no experience directing foreign policy or national security. But, I might add, I’ve never argued with a rightie with any more experience than I have. Yet they always assume they know more than I do.

But Scowcroft has experience, and he says I was right.

Speaking of Saddam, in today’s Washington Post Jim Hoagland writes that Saddam’s lawyers may present testimony that might cause the Bushies some discomfort.

Saddam Hussein’s lawyers have announced their intention to make past U.S. complicity with the Iraqi dictator an essential part of the defense in his Baghdad trial. Let’s hope they keep their poisonous word. …

“Americans . . . want to blame Saddam for the mass graves and killing Kurds,” Khalil Dulaimi, the dictator’s lead lawyer, told the Wall Street Journal. “But they forget that they supported Saddam back then.”…

… Official Washington helped Hussein suppress Iraqis so he could fight Iran (Reagan), called on the people to rise up against the dictator only to abandon them when they did (Bush 41) or relied on economic sanctions that slowly ground Iraqi society into dust while providing a political alibi at home for not acting (Clinton). The unnecessary misery, political strife and corruption that a misbegotten and mismanaged occupation now contributes to Iraq must also be added to the list.

Hoagland argues that Americans owe Iraq “more than a sudden case of moral amnesia to bolster precipitous withdrawal.” I agree with Hoagland in principle. But it’s hard to see how not-withdrawing is helping Iraq, either.

Before I forget–we are about to reach the 2000 mark–2,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. We may have reached it already, but as I keyboard the most recent information says we’re at 1,996, ten of which have not yet been confirmed by the Department of Defense. United for Peace and Justice and other organizations are calling for an antiwar action the day after the U.S. announces the 2,000th death. You can follow the link to see if anything is being organized near you.

Mired in Miers

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To tell the truth, I haven’t thought much about Harriet Miers. I figured (a) everything we are hearing about her is spin, and (b) her nomination could be withdrawn before there are hearings, so she’s a bridge we may never have to cross. Bloggers of the Right are thinking about her a lot, though. NZ Bear provides a table showing where righties are coming out on Miers–pretty solidly against.

And I’m wondering if one of those righties opposed to the nomination of Harriet Miers is … Harriet Miers.

Last week we heard that she gave half-assed answers to a questionnaire required by the Senate for federal judicial nominees. Embarrassing answers, in fact. David Savage wrote in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times that some scholars who saw her answers are shocked she made it out of law school.

At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, “the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.”

But the Supreme Court repeatedly has said the Constitution’s guarantee of “equal protection of the laws” does not mean that city councils or state legislatures must have the same proportion of blacks, Latinos and Asians as the voting population.

“That’s a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause,” said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. “If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable.”

David Stout of the New York Times wrote last week,

The contentious nomination of Harriet E. Miers to the Supreme Court hit another snag this afternoon when both the Republican chairman and ranking Democrat of the Senate Judiciary Committee said her responses to senators’ questions had thus far been unsatisfactory.

The committee chairman, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said Ms. Miers should redo a questionnaire prepared by a bipartisan Senate panel because her initial responses had been insufficient on “many, many of the items.”

The ranking Democrat, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, agreed that Ms. Miers’s effort on the questionnaire had been “inadequate,” adding that some of his Senate colleagues had found her responses “ranged from incomplete to insulting.”

So what’s up with this? Surely Ms. Miers has noticed people are questioning her qualifications. You’d think she’d have tried a little harder.

But this morning on ABC’s “This Week,” David Brooks (whose New York Times column today is truly insipid but safely tucked away behind a subscription wall) said that he didn’t believe President Bush would allow Miers to withdraw even if she wanted to. I didn’t note down the exact quote, but Brooks said that if Miers went to Bush and told him she’d rather not go forward with the nomination, he’d say, forget it; we’re fighting this thing through.

I don’t remember where I read it, but somebody said last week that the Miers nomination was bordering on cruelty to Harriet Miers. She’s not ready for prime time, and everyone in America seems to know this but George W. Bush. Oh, and Hugh Hewitt. Not exactly the Brainiac Twins.

The sloppiness of Miers’s answers on the Senate questionnaire raises questions about how much she really wants the job.

Rightie blogger Stephen Bainbridge noted last week that Miers has a reputation for being meticulous about details, but her questionnaire answers said otherwise.

Matthew Scully wrote of SCOTUS nominee Harriet Miers that:

... Harriet Miers, in everything she does, gives high attention to detail. And the trait came in handy with drafts of presidential speeches, in which she routinely exposed weak arguments, bogus statistics and claims inconsistent with previous remarks long forgotten by the rest of us. If one speech declared X “our most urgent domestic priority,” and another speech seven months earlier had said it was Y, it would be Harriet Miers alone who noted the contradiction.

… It may be, in fact, that a details person is just what the Supreme Court needs right now. …

…Then David Hoffman found a puzzling conflation of venue and subject matter jurisdiction in Miers’ Senate Judiciary questionnaire. Next my friend and colleague Vic Fleischer parsed another section of the questionnaire and concluded:

I’m sort of amazed this woman made it through a clerkship. The most desperate cries for the red pen: “An example, of this distinction …” (delete the comma!), “position, we were against flag burning” (semi-colon or period, not comma), “requirements, as well” (awk).

… The problem goes beyond misplaced commas. Her answer sounds like that of an earnest (but not overly bright) high school student writing a practice essay for the SAT. “The Council was free to state its policy position, we were against flag burning.” Hmmm. Did the Council state its policy position, or did it enact a statute? Did the Council itself have an obligation to consider whether the ban was constitutional? If not, why not? Should the Council just enact whatever it wants, constitutional or not, and wait for the courts to knock it down?

The world is full of bright people who can’t spell and punctuate and whose prose is boring as turnips. But in general I believe that sloppy writing indicates sloppy thinking. People who think with precision usually write with precision, especially when they know the writing is going to be carefully scrutinized.

And if there is one thing a Supreme Court justice needs to be able to do it’s to think and write with precision. In controversial cases the written decisions of the justices are parsed to death by both the court-watching public and the entire judicial system. Regardless of Miers’s ideological predilictions, whatever they are, if she were to slap together written arguments as casually as she answered the questionnaire, her sloppiness could do considerable mischief.

(FYI, the famous Robert Bork WSJ essay on Miers’s writing inability is here.)

But is it possible she really could have done better on the questionnaire but chose not to? She may have consciously decided to do a poor job to poison her chances in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Or, it’s possible the fight for the nomination is so painful for her she couldn’t bring herself to spend time on the questionnaire, and raced through it to get it over with. (I have the same struggle every year with facing up to income tax forms, so I commiserate.)

The questionnaire raises another question, which is how much help Miers is (or is not) getting in the White House? From the David Savage article linked above:

Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan, also an expert on voting rights, said she was surprised the White House did not check Miers’ questionnaire before sending it to the Senate.

“Are they trying to set her up? Any halfway competent junior lawyer could have checked the questionnaire and said it cannot go out like that. I find it shocking,” she said.

I’ve seen speculation that Bush charged ahead with the Miers nomination against the wishes of Cheney and Rove and other major players in the administration. Is it possible that the Miers nomination is so much Bush’s baby that administration officials are walking away from the fight? If that’s the case, the Bush White House has gone past “disarray” and is well on the way to “dysfunction.”

As long as we’re out on a limb, let’s go out a little further and consider the possibility that there are people in the White House who want the Miers nomination to be withdrawn to protect Bush. Recent news stories have told us some interesting things about Miers and her relationship to Bush. For example:

As Texas Lottery commissioner, Miers squashed an investigation into corruption at Governor Bush’s request. The following is from World Net Daily, believe it or not:

Larry Litwin was fired in 1997 as executive director of the Texas Lottery Commission because then-Governor George Bush wanted an investigation into possible criminal political-influence buying squashed, and then-commissioner Harriet Miers, a Bush appointee, complied with his wishes and terminated him – that is the story Litwin is prepared to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Litwin’s concerns over corruption in the agency he directed involved GTECH, the Rhode Island company that operated the lottery, prominent Texas lobbyists on GTECH’s payroll, and a laundry list of Texas politicians – Democrat and Republican. Those details and the facts surrounding his firing will be offered to the Senate Judiciary Committee as soon as GTECH delivers a letter to committee staff releasing him from a 1998 gag order negotiated to end his wrongful termination federal lawsuit against GTECH.

WND has learned Littwin’s testimony will disclose bi-partisan corruption, with money changing hands in a political influence buying scheme that spread Texas lottery money around widely, to Democrats and Republicans alike. Sources say Littwin’s testimony will put new light on the over $160,000 in payments the Bush gubernatorial campaigns made to Harriet Miers’ Locke Liddell law firm, including the $19,000 she was paid in 1995 to act as Bush’s personal emissary in a mission to make sure Ben Barnes kept the lid on George Bush’s explanation of preferential treatment he received when getting into the Texas Air National Guard ahead of a long list of other applicants.

Did that just say Bush got preferential treatment getting into the Texas Air National Guard? Hard to tell, if you get really precise about it. You could interpret this to mean there was a Ben Barnes story that Bush had to explain away. But the fact that World Net Daily published this is a sure sign of the Apocalypse. (Repent noooooooow!) And this is another issue I’m sure the Bushies would rather stay dormant.

And Miers may have some scandals independent of Bush, or at least without known connections to Bush. Jack Douglas and Stephen Henderson of Knight Ridder report:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers collected more than 10 times the market value for a small slice of family-owned land in a large Superfund pollution cleanup site in Dallas where the state wanted to build a highway off-ramp.

The windfall came after a judge who received thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from Miers’ law firm appointed a close professional associate of Miers and an outspoken property-rights activist to the three-person panel that determined how much the state should pay.

The resulting six-figure payout to the Miers family in 2000 was despite the state’s objections to the “excessive” amount and to the process used to set the price. The panel recommended paying nearly $5 a square foot for land that was valued at less than 30 cents a square foot.

Mediation efforts in 2003 reduced the award from $106,915 to $80,915, but Miers, who controls the family’s interest in the land, hasn’t reimbursed the state for the $26,000 difference, even after Bush appointed her to the Supreme Court.

At this point I’m opposed to Miers for the SCOTUS. And this would be true even if I had a memo from the spirit of Margaret Sanger telling me Miers was OK on Roe v. Wade. She’s just plain not qualified.

On the other hand, the hearings could be a ton of fun …

Update: Looks like the nomination’s days are numbered.