Politics

Wall Street Opinion Journal John Fund Thursday, October 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

Harriet Miers’s nomination resulted from a failed vetting process.

“There’s a standard vetting process that we go through with all nominees.”–White House spokesman Scott McClellan

“The president is very, very confident in his judgments about people, and he likes to reward loyalty.”–Brad Berenson, an associate White House counsel in the first Bush term.

The vetting of Harriet Miers leaves questions that demand answers, not more spin or allegations that critics are “sexist” or “elitist.” It was so botched and riddled with conflicts of interest that it demands at a minimum an internal White House investigation to ensure it won’t happen again.

Wall Street Journal John Fund Monday, October 10, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

I have changed my mind about Harriet Miers. Last Thursday, I wrote in OpinionJournal’s Political Diary that “while skepticism of Ms. Miers is justified, the time is fast approaching when such expressions should be muted until the Senate hearings begin. At that point, Ms. Miers will finally be able to speak for herself.”

But that was before I interviewed more than a dozen of her friends and colleagues along with political players in Texas. I came away convinced that questions about Ms. Miers should be raised now–and loudly–because she has spent her entire life avoiding giving a clear picture of herself. “She is unrevealing to the point that it’s an obsession,” says one of her close colleagues at her law firm.

White House aides who have worked with her for five years report she zealously advocated the president’s views, but never gave any hint of her own. Indeed, when the Dallas Morning News once asked Ms. Miers to finish the sentence, “Behind my back, people say . . .,” she responded, “. . . they can’t figure me out.”

Wall Street Journal October 11, 2005; Page A16

The world will learn a lot more about Harriet Miers in coming weeks, so we’re not going to join the pack already chasing her back to Texas. But one strategy that the White House would be wise to drop is its not-too-subtle promotion of both her religion and her personal views on abortion.

In case you haven’t heard, Ms. Miers is an evangelical Christian who is personally opposed to abortion. A main White House talking point is that she fought to reverse the American Bar Association’s position supporting abortion rights. We are supposed to believe — wink, wink — that this means Ms. Miers is a judicial conservative who would oppose the likes of Roe v. Wade. The National Right to Life Committee has already endorsed Ms. Miers. And James Dobson of Focus on the Family has endorsed her because, he says, “I know the individual who brought her to the Lord” and because “I do know things that I am not prepared to talk about here [on TV].”

We’ll concede that Mr. Dobson’s sources upstairs are better than ours. But whatever he knows, if it concerns Ms. Miers’s religion it doesn’t tell us anything about how she’ll rule on the Supreme Court. Allow us to recall the case of Anthony Kennedy.

Human Events Patrick J. Buchanan October 3, 2005

Handed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to return the Supreme Court to constitutionalism, George W. Bush passed over a dozen of the finest jurists of his day — to name his personal lawyer.

In a decision deeply disheartening to those who invested such hopes in him, Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren.

This is not to disparage Harriet Miers. From all accounts, she is a gracious lady who has spent decades in the law and served ably as Bush’s lawyer in Texas and, for a year, as White House counsel.

But her qualifications for the Supreme Court are non-existent. She is not a brilliant jurist, indeed, has never been a judge. She is not a scholar of the law. Researchers are hard-pressed to dig up an opinion. She has not had a brilliant career in politics, the academy, the corporate world or public forum. Were she not a friend of Bush, and female, she would never have even been considered.
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Murray Soupcoff

When will the “caring” activists of the left ever learn? Never have so few individuals with so many good intentions created so much miseryfor so many people whom they wanted to help. As the social-engineering debacles of the last half century in the United States have demonstrated, carelessness in “caring” for thedisadvantaged in our society only leads to a glaringly uncaring result.

After all, it was pioneering liberal-left social engineers in the 1940’s and 50’s who came up with the not-so-creative idea of fighting poverty in American slums by ripping down existing for-profitrental housing and replacing the existing rental stock with the cold, massive, impersonal concrete human stockyards we now know as public housing projects — the equivalent of urban hell for severalgenerations of the poor in North America. Not only was poverty not checked by this urban “reform,” but the absence of cheap rooming houses and other lodgings for society’s marginalizedcitizens ultimately created the phenomenon of urban homelessness. And of course, we all know the many wonderful benefits that came with living in comfy, government-subsidized “projects” –rampant drug addiction, vandalism, family breakup, gang wars, killings and social decay.

Oh, and did we mention an even more ingrained “cycle of poverty”?

Read the entire article.

White culpability for black poverty.

London Times Online John McWhorter

Black poverty is the result of 30 years of misguided welfare rather than racism, says John McWhorter

As it quickly became clear that there was a certain demographic skew among the people stranded in New Orleans, journalists began intoning that Hurricane Katrina had stripped bare the continuing racial inequity in America.

The extent to which this was hidden is unclear, actually. An awareness that a tragic disproportion of black Americans are poor has been a hallmark of civic awareness among educated Americans for 40 years now.

The problem is less a lack of awareness than a lack of understanding. The publicly sanctioned take is that “white supremacy” is why 80% of New Orleans’s poor people are black. The civics lesson, we are to think, is that the civil rights revolution left a job undone in an America still hostile to black advancement.

In fact, white America does remain morally culpable — but because white leftists in the late 1960s, in the name of enlightenment and benevolence, encouraged the worst in human nature among blacks and even fostered it in legislation. The hordes of poor blacks stuck in the Superdome last week wound up there not because the White Man barred them from doing better, but because certain tragically influential White Men destroyed the fragile but lasting survival skills poor black communities had maintained since the end of slavery.

Read the entire article on the London Times Online website.

LBJ’s Other Quagmire: Long before Katrina, the welfare state failed New Orleans’s poor.
Wall Street Opinon Journal BRENDAN MINITER Tuesday, September 13, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

“What the American people have seen in this incredible disparity in which those people who had cars and money got out, and those people who were impoverished died.”

The above comment about Hurricane Katrina comes to us from Ted Kennedy, who went on to say that the question for Chief Justice-designate John Roberts is whether he stands for “a fairer, more just nation” or will use “narrow, stingy interpretations of the law to frustrate progress.” But why stop there? Sen. Kennedy is onto something and, indeed, the question isn’t only for Judge Roberts. It’s also one for the national debate now under way in the wake of the most devastating hurricane to hit the U.S. in decades.
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