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Bush Nominates Reagan to the Court!
Judiciary
Hatched by Dafydd
This will be my last post on Harriet Miers for some days, not because there's not more to say but because I'm tired of talking about it (and I presume most readers are getting more than a little tired of reading about it!)
I was talking with a friend (another Dogface), and he said that he was really annoyed with Bush for (as he put it) telling one of his extremely rare "lies." "What lie was that?" "When he said that he believed Miers was the most qualified person for the Court." "I think Bush actually believes that." "Then," said my friend, "Bush has totally lost it."
And at that moment, I had a Revelation stronger and more sudden than anything I've experience since I quit taking LSD back in the 1980s: I suddenly understood exactly why Bush nominated Harriet Miers instead of (say) J. Michael Luttig.
In my last post, riffing off Captain Ed's Washington Post piece on the taxonomy of the Miers debaters, I talked about the fourth class of conservatives, what I called the Cowboys. These are intelligent but non-intellectual (even anti-intellectual) folks who don't try to articulate their conservativeness... they simply live it. I noted that Bush belongs to this class, rather than to the Loyalist Army, the Rebel Alliance, or the Trench-Dwelling Dogfaces, all of whom at least have pretensions to being intellectuals.
The Cowboys very much distrust intellectuals because they believe those eggheads can talk themselves into believing anything. Case in point: how many extraordinarily intelligent and perspicacious intellectuals managed to talk themselves into believing in Communism, including such later conservative luminaries as Whittaker Chambers, David Horowitz, and about half the founding staff of Bill Buckley's National Review?
(When asked why so many NR editors were ex-Communists, Buckley simply grinned and repeated "EX-Communists!")
In contrast, there is a very special kind of person found almost exclusively among the Cowboys. For want of a better word, I'll call this sort a Gipper. A Gipper (Ronald Reagan is the prototypical example) is a person who doesn't need to logically reason his way to rightness, because he has an instantaneous intuitive understanding of right and wrong.
Despite so many of Reagan's friends and mentors falling for the Communist line, and despite the fact that Reagan was a New-Deal Democrat, Ronald Reagan never once, not even for a moment, had anything but absolute contempt and loathing for Communism and its kid-sister Socialism. He started fighting the Communists in the 1940s, during the war, while even FDR himself was pedaling the line that "Uncle Joe" Stalin was an enlightened, progressive, scientific, and democratic leader.
(Don't believe me about FDR? Rent a copy of the 1943 Warner Brothers movie Mission to Moskow, made by Jack Warner on direct orders from Roosevelt himself and filmed from the diary of FDR's former ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies.)
Reagan happened to be an excellent writer, but he never thought of himself as an intellectual. His genius was first in seeing the right, then in being able to explain it in terms that were not only universally understandable but extraordinarily persuasive. Buckley made conservatism respectable, but it took Reagan to make it popular.
Anybody who knew Reagan for any length of time knew that, no matter what compromise he was forced to accept due to circumstances, Reagan would never, ever "drift to the left," "grow in office," or accept the nearly universally held postulate that Socialism was the way of the future, and the New Soviet Man was the future of Mankind.
Since everyone reading this far is probably both intelligent and pretty intellectual, I predict that you're way ahead of me. George Bush knows Harriet Miers extremely well; he clearly believes that she is not only a Cowgirl but also has an uncanny knack for immediately knowing the right thing to do (from Bush's point of view).
George Bush sees Miers as a female Ronald Reagan: to him, she is a Gipper.
The reason he believes that she will never be seduced by intellectual arguments for judicial activism is that she has that eerie ability to cut through the crap and see the true, ignoble self of the Left. And he believes that she knows what is the right thing to do and can articulate it to the other justices in their conferences before they vote. Bush would argue that it's a thousand times more valuable to be able to persuade one or two justices to her way of thinking -- than simply to write a brilliant, erudite, and scathing dissenting opinion, as Antonin Scalia so often does.
He sees her lack of an intellectual paper trail not as a drawback that must be explained but the very reason he trusts her in the first place: Harriet Miers would never have been impressed by the mighty brains who proved in the 1930s that Das Kapital was the blueprint for secular paradise.
I was somewhat subdued by this flash of comprehension. Of course I don't know if Bush is right about Harriet Miers; I don't know the woman. But I now believe he is right about the basic approach -- there should be at least one person on the Court who is not an intellectual and has a natural immunity to the soulless absurdities that intellectuals can so readily rationalize. The Supreme Court needs a Gipper to slap the other justices across the face and say "snap out of it!"
According to Newsmax.com (a source I almost never cite, for obvious reasons), Antonin Scalia himself seems to have come to a strikingly similar opinion:
"There is now nobody with that [non judicial] background after the death of the previous chief," Scalia laments to [CNBC's Maria ] Bartiromo.
"And the reason that's happened, I think, is that the nomination and confirmation process has become so controversial, so politicized that I think a president does not want to give the opposition an easy excuse [to say] 'Well, this person has no judicial experience.'"
Scalia concludes: "I don't think that's a good thing. I think the Byron Whites, the Lewis Powells and the Bill Rehnquists have contributed to the court even though they didn't sit on a lower federal court."
I wouldn't have made such an appointment myself. But then, I'm not a Cowboy.
speederdoc said:Cowboys (and Texans in general) do tend to shoot from the hip.
Most of the time we hit what we're aiming at.
