Harriet Miers for Supreme Court??

Indulge me for a moment while I share a full-fledged attack of progressive paranoia.... When Bush nominated Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court, my first reaction was similar to most people's -- "who?!" Not having made a point of familiarizing myself with those in Bush's less public inner circle, I had never heard of the woman. And frankly, I'd rather have kept it that way. [By the way, for those of you who do want to know more about Harriet Miers, a good starting place is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harriet_Miers.] I think one of the conservative idealogues fighting the Miers nomination put it best: there is nothing in Harriet Miers' prior record that suggests she has the qualifications or intellect to serve on the United States Supreme Court. Remember, it was Papa Bush who nominated Clarence Thomas to the Court -- our last example of a completely unqualified nominee being used to replace a highly respected jurist based on race/sex demographics, rather than on intellect and talent. Justice Thomas, in my humble opinion, has been an embarrassment to the Court from his nomination to the present. He has brought nothing to the position he holds in the way of either intellect or values -- he almost never authors opinions, but simply joins in the opinions of others with more guts and brains than himself -- he rarely even participates in questionning attorneys from the Bench. (Do you want to know what I really think about Clarence Thomas???) Now here we go with Harriet Miers -- she's a woman, which apparently makes her qualified to replace Justice O'Connor regardless of her intellect or values. Now, here's my progressive paranoid flight: When Harriet Miers was nominated, I expected a swift and fierce reaction from progressives. After all, she's BUSH'S PERSONAL ATTORNEY. She's ONE OF BUSH'S CLOSEST FRIENDS. Worst of all, she has been quoted as saying that BUSH IS ONE OF THE SMARTEST MEN SHE'S EVER MET! Is there any chance at all that she will be in any way moderate, or even impartial, when it comes to ruling on any issue in which the Executive Branch holds a stake??? Hmmm, how do you think Ms. Miers would have ruled in Bush v. Gore -- let me think....... Then, all of a sudden, the right wing of the Republican Party started having fits about Harriet Miers. Wanna-be Supreme Court Justice Robert Bork came out swinging, calling her nomination "a disaster on every level." Headlines everywhere sung the news that Miers isn't pronounced enough in her conservative ideology to be acceptable to the far right. But what happened to the voice of the Left??? Although Move On is valiantly trying to collect real information about Harriet Miers (to contribute information on her, go to www.moveon.org), and the American Constitutional Society is devoting a large section of their website to reviewing the importance of judicial nominations in general, and the current nominations in particular (see http://www.americanconstitutionsociety.org/judiciary/index.html), the media seems to be exclusively focused on criticism from the Right. And here's my fear: what are the Democrats, Independents and moderate Republicans doing to build a strong coalition to fight this nomination?? Is it true, as it currently appears, that progressives in Congress are sitting back and letting the conservatives do the heavy lifting on this one?? Because according to today's San Francisco Chronicle, Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition has now given Ms. Meirs the evangelical-extremist-stamp-of-approval, and I'm prepared to bet that the Bush strongmen will manage to do sufficient arm-twisting to bring the rest of the posse into line before too much longer. And where will that leave the rest of us?? I'm really concerned here, folks, that we're being lulled into a sense of security that there is enough protest on the Right that the Left doesn't need to get so worried about this one. And I'm really concerned that we're wrong. And I'm really concerned that the Right will decide that Harriet's okay just late enough in the game to prevent the Left and the Center from organizing sufficiently to keep this woman off the Supreme Court. Which makes me really concerned. Even if Robert Bork and I have never agreed about a single thing before in our entire lives, we agree that Harriet Miers appears to be completely unqualified to sit on the United States Supreme Court, even if she is a woman. So please, folks, don't rely on the far right to keep Meirs off the Court. If we're going to defeat her nomination, we all have to stay in the fight. I agree, we have some very strange bedfellows right now, but these are very strange times....