[Mb-civic] Miers's qualifications - Kevin P. Martin - Boston Globe

[William Swiggard]

Miers's qualifications

By Kevin P. Martin  |  October 7, 2005

PRESIDENT BUSH'S nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court has 
been met with a remarkable amount of resistance from conservative 
pundits, including such luminaries as George Will, who have stumbled 
over themselves rushing to question her credentials. According to these 
critics, because Miers is not a well-known judge, attorney, or legal 
scholar, there is reason to doubt her competency to serve as a Supreme 
Court justice. Because she is likely incompetent, the reasoning goes, 
Bush appointed her just because she is a crony.

Frankly, it is stunning that conservatives would jump to these 
conclusions. Any suggestion that Miers lacks the basic competency to 
perform the functions of a Supreme Court justice betrays a lack of 
understanding of how the Supreme Court operates. It also naïvely assumes 
that the president's task in selecting justices is simply to identify 
the ''most qualified" individual for the position.

The qualities needed by a Supreme Court justice are not necessarily 
those needed by an advocate or scholar. By the time the court agrees to 
take a case, it has already been the subject of rounds of litigation in 
the lower courts. Indeed, the court generally will not even take a case 
unless the issues it raises have already been addressed by several 
federal courts of appeal and state supreme courts. When the court takes 
a case, the issues it raises have already been well developed and the 
arguments on each side honed.

Moreover, cases argued before the court are the subject of extensive 
briefing by the well-qualified members of the Supreme Court bar and the 
federal and state solicitors general. Each justice also has a staff of 
four experienced law clerks, top graduates of the nation's most 
prestigious law schools, to assist them in synthesizing and analyzing 
the pertinent lower-court opinions and briefs as well as the court's own 
precedents.

The point is that a Supreme Court justice need not come to the job with 
an already well-developed expertise in constitutional law. There is not 
even a requirement that a justice have the fluid pen of a Justice 
Antonin Scalia; Chief Justice William Rehnquist was known for his 
straightforward, ''just the facts" writing style. What a Supreme Court 
justice needs most is good judgment and a principled approach to 
interpreting the Constitution and laws. And nothing -- nothing -- 
Miers's critics have pointed to yet suggests that she lacks either 
judgment or a principled approach to legal interpretation.

To the contrary, President Bush, who twice campaigned on his commitment 
to appointing judicial conservatives to the bench and who knows Miers 
well, has vouched both for her judgment and her conservative bona fides. 
And as White House counsel, she has been required to make judgments on 
issues of constitutional law, such as the separation of powers, 
executive privilege, and federal authority. There is no reason for 
conservatives to believe that she has performed this job incompetently.

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2005/10/07/mierss_qualifications/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051007/42716764/attachment.htm