Harriet Versus The World...

Patterico’s Pontifications » Harriet Miers vs. The United States Supreme Court

Harriet Miers:
While I was an at-large member of the Dallas City Council, I dealt with issues that involved constitutional questions. For instance, when addressing a lawsuit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause.

The Supreme Court:
The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment does not require proportional representation as an imperative of political organization. The entitlement that the dissenting opinion assumes to exist simply is not to be found in the Constitution of the United States.
Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980) (addressing a voting dilution claim under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act brought against at-large Commissioners of the Mobile, Alabama Commission).

"So: it’s not just pointy-headed legal scholars who say that the Equal Protection Clause does not have a “proportional representation” requirement. If you disagree with that assertion, then you don’t just have a problem with the legal scholars. You have a problem with the Supreme Court.
And yes, I understand the argument that Miers was referring to the “one man person, one vote” rule. That may be. But the Supreme Court quote I just gave you should establish beyond any doubt that Miers’s language was, at a minimum, both 1) sloppy and 2) contrary to a settled understanding of the phrase."

Okay, there's ample evidence she's sloppy, and mounting evidence that she has problems with defining a settled understanding of the phrase, ANY phrase, but so did Joannie [her real first name] Ginsberg, and it never got in HER way. That someone may have an opinion differing from the Supreme Court's isn't exactly an earthshattering discovery, so in all of our quests for the bottom line we have two choices, two ways of explaining all of this flubadub.

She's relatively incompentent, or she's a borderline lefty.

Neither exactly warms the cockles.