[Mb-civic] RECOMMENDED READING: A Departure's Lasting Damage - E. J. Dionne - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Departure's Lasting Damage

By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, October 28, 2005; Page A23

The damage President Bush and the conservative movement have inflicted 
on their drive to pack the Supreme Court with allies will not be undone 
by Harriet Miers's decision to withdraw her nomination.

In picking such a vulnerable nominee, Bush single-handedly undercut the 
conservatives' long-standing claim that the Senate and the rest of us 
owed great deference to a president's choice for the court. 
Conservatives displayed absolutely no deference to Bush when he picked 
someone they didn't like. The actual conservative "principle" was that 
the Senate should defer to the president's choice -- as long as that 
choice was acceptable to conservatives. Some principle.

Republicans had railed against Democratic efforts to press court 
nominees (including Chief Justice John Roberts) for their views on legal 
issues. Back in July The Post disclosed a planning document circulated 
among Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. The document said 
nominees for the Supreme Court should avoid disclosing "personal 
political views or legal thinking on any issue." Liberals were terribly 
gauche and inappropriate for wanting to know someone's opinions before 
awarding that person life tenure on the nation's most powerful court.

But it was neither gauche nor inappropriate for conservatives to de mand 
that Miers clarify her views on a slew of issues, notably Roe v. Wade . 
When liberals asked for clarity, they were committing a sin. When 
conservatives asked for clarity, they were engaged in a virtuous act. 
Thus are conservatives permitted to alter their principles to suit their 
own political situation.

There was also that small matter of a nominee's religious views. 
Conservatives condemned liberals who suggested it was worth knowing how 
Roberts's religious convictions might affect his judging. But when Miers 
started running into trouble with conservatives, the Bush administration 
encouraged its allies to talk up Miers's deep religious convictions to 
curry favor among social conservatives. I guess it's okay for 
conservatives to bring up religion whenever they want, but never 
appropriate for liberals to speak of spiritual things.

Even the manner of Miers's exit was disingenuous, not to mention 
derivative. In announcing her withdrawal, the White House said that "it 
is clear that senators would not be satisfied until they gained access 
to internal documents concerning advice provided during her tenure at 
the White House -- disclosures that would undermine a president's 
ability to receive candid counsel." Miers's decision, the statement 
said, "demonstrates her deep respect for this essential aspect of the 
constitutional separation of powers."

The White House was following, almost to the letter, the exit strategy 
outlined last week by my conservative colleague Charles Krauthammer. But 
Krauthammer was honest enough to admit what the White House could not: 
that all this verbiage was about saving face. The president had to know 
when he named Miers that her lack of a judicial paper trail would make 
her advice as White House counsel all the more important for the Senate 
to know. Bush figured that conservatives would do what they have so 
often done before: roll over, back him up, resist requests for documents 
and help him force Miers through. Bad call.

Bush and the conservatives would now like to pretend that none of this 
happened. The idea on the right is that Bush should nominate a staunch 
conservative with an ample judicial record and pick a big fight with 
Democrats that would unite the conservative movement. It's hard to 
escape the idea that with special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald 
breathing down the administration's neck, the president decided he could 
not afford any further fractures in his own political coalition. So he 
threw Miers over the side.

This has been a powerfully instructive moment. The willingness of 
conservatives to abandon what they had once held up as high and 
unbending principles reveals that this battle over the Supreme Court is, 
for them, a simple struggle for power. It is thus an unfortunate 
reminder of the highly unprincipled Supreme Court decision in 2000 that 
helped put Bush in the White House. Conservatives who had long insisted 
on deference to states' rights put those commitments aside when doing so 
would advance the political fortunes of one of their own.

Miers will recover from all this in a way Bush and the conservatives 
will not. She has suffered collateral damage caused by a president who 
did not understand the degree to which his power has eroded and did not 
grasp the nature of the movement that elected him. And conservatives 
will come to regret making their willingness to contradict their own 
principles plain for all to see.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/27/AR2005102701849.html
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