Liars and fools

It was on Fox News, so it has to be true:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers has long opposed abortion but would set aside personal views when deciding legal issues, her close friend who has been a leading advocate for her nomination said on Sunday.

"She is pro-life, and she has been for 25 years," Nathan Hecht, a Texas Supreme Court justice and Miers' longtime friend, said on "Fox News Sunday."

Asked how Miers, with that view, could conceivably vote to uphold the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that affirmed a woman's right to abortion, Hecht said, "legal issues and personal issues are just two different things. Judges do it all the time."

Guess what else judges do all the time? Make rulings in line with their personal views. From the April 19 NYT, by way of trutuout.org:

Conservative politicians insist that courts should defer to the democratically elected branches, but conservative judges do not seem to be listening. The Supreme Court's conservative majority regularly overturns laws passed by Congress, like the Violence Against Women Act and the Gun-Free School Zones Act.

Justice Scalia likes to boast that he follows his strict-constructionist philosophy wherever it leads, even if it leads to results he disagrees with. But it is uncanny how often it leads him just where he already wanted to go. In his view, the 14th Amendment prohibits Michigan from using affirmative action in college admissions, but lets Texas make gay sex a crime. (The Supreme Court has held just the opposite.) He is dismissive when inmates invoke the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment to challenge prison conditions. But he is supportive when wealthy people try to expand the "takings clause" to block the government from regulating their property.

The classic example of conservative inconsistency remains Bush v. Gore. Not only did the court's conservative bloc trample on the Florida state courts and stop the vote counting - it declared its ruling would not be a precedent for future cases. How does Justice Scalia explain that decision? In a recent New Yorker profile, he is quoted as saying, with startling candor, that "the only issue was whether we should put an end to it, after three weeks of looking like a fool in the eyes of the world." That, of course, isn't a constitutional argument - it is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism.

But Miers' friend said she can be impartial, so it must be true. And she said it on Fox, which really buttresses its believability.

Some conservatives are crying foul over the nomination, saying they have no way to know if she's reliable enough to push their agenda. This has prompted some Democrats to actually defend Miers from the conservative attacks.

Chumps.

Politics, or perhaps more accurately the Democratic party, has become so knee-jerk and unthinking that these fools automatically take the opposite stance of their opponents. Democrats are trying to score points by pointing out how "ugly" the attacks of conservatives against Miers are, but all they're doing is feeding the notion that they don't stand for anything and merely react to what those on the other side of the aisle do. Do these hacks realize that they are defending a Bush nominee, a nominee who has no judicial experience whatsoever, a nominee who was picked because she's a crony?

They're actually defending the president's nominating his lawyer to the Supreme Court.

What's the next move in this brilliant strategy? "We'll show you conservatives. We'll vote to confirm this nominee, this unqualified Bush crony, to sit on the United States Supreme Court"?

If these idiots value their jobs, they better snap out of this "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" illusion and grow some bone in their backs. The fact that Miers was nominated by Bush, the fact that she's a Bush loyalist and his attorney should tell them everything they need to know.