The Trouble With Harriet

President George W. Bush has nominated Harriet Miers, the official White House Counsel, to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS).

The nomination was made on Monday October 3rd, 2005, the same day that John Roberts officially took his seat as Bush’s first SCOTUS appointee, and also took the reigns as the new Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing the recently deceased William Rehnquist.

The fact that the President had the opportunity to appoint two new judges to the court at all during his term, let alone the rare opportunity to appoint two within a couple of months, should have been a cause for euphoric celebration on the Right, his and the Republican party’s base.

When Mr. Bush was elected, he promised his constituency that, if given an opportunity to make appointments to the court, his appointee(s) would be strict constructionists in the mold of current conservative SCOTUS stalwarts Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.

In last year’s Presidential election, Bush defeated Democratic nominee John Kerry by receiving over 62 million votes, the highest vote total ever received by any American candidate for the office.

A large number of these voters, certainly the vast majority needed to secure Mr. Bush’s victory, knew when they cast their ballots that there was a strong likelihood of at least one, and likely multiple SCOTUS openings that would be filled by the man sitting in the Oval Office during the next term.

Mr. Bush’s pledge to appoint solid conservatives who could likely be counted on to help reverse the court’s decades-long liberal leanings was one of the principal reasons that he received many of those votes.

So now, flash forward to less than a year after the election. Justice O’Connor announces her retirement, and within a couple of months, aging Chief Justice Rehnquist passes away after a period of ill health.

Within a year, Mr. Bush has the opportunity to reward those 62 million voters with a pair of solid, proven conservative constructionists.

Courting a Texas Originalist

The announcement was not unexpected, it had been rumored at least for weeks. And yet when Sandra Day O’Connor announced her resignation from the U.S. Supreme Court last week it still seemed to take many of us by surprise.

It has been 11 long years since the last opening occurred on the nation’s highest court, and it was beginning to seem like this latest coterie of individuals would preside over our most intimate and important issues forever.

Of course, nothing lasts forever but God Himself, and so this opening for a new appointment to the court was inevitable.

Mrs. O’Connor was the first female to ever be appointed to the court, named by the man who was just recently voted the greatest American in history by a poll conducted by the Discovery Channel and AOL, beloved former President Ronald Reagan.

However, it was not just making history that Reagan was after. He had been out front in helping defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, which proved to be the death knell for the activist womens’ movement that had swept across liberal America during the 1970’s.

In defeating the ERA, Reagan had promised to appoint the first woman to the high court if elected in 1980. When he nominated O’Connor, who was obviously pro-abortion in her decisions, the most conservative Senators fell in line and approved her, not wanting to challenge their staunchly conservative leader as he appointed the first woman ever to the court.