His last few offerings were of the meandering, it's a silly time of year so I'll be silly, sort, but the old George returns with a vengeance as he rails against the absurd selection of Harriet Miers for Supreme Court Justice:
New York Post Online Edition: postopinion
by George Will
"It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.
The wisdom of presumptive opposition to Miers' confirmation flows from the fact that constitutional reasoning is a talent; a skill acquired, as intellectual skills are, by years of practice sustained by intense interest. It is not usually acquired in the normal course of even a fine lawyer's career. The burden is on Miers to demonstrate such talents, and on senators to compel such a demonstration or reject the nomination.
Under the rubric of "diversity," nowadays, the first refuge of intellectually disreputable impulses, the president announced, surely without fathoming the implications, his belief in identity politics and its tawdry corollary, the idea of categorical representation. Identity politics holds that one's essential attributes are genetic, biological, ethnic or chromosomal, that one's nature and understanding are decisively shaped by race, ethnicity or gender. Categorical representation holds that the interests of a group can only be understood, empathized with and represented by a member of that group.
The crowning absurdity of the president's wallowing in such nonsense is the obvious assumption that the Supreme Court is, like a legislature, an institution of representation. This from a president who, introducing Miers, deplored judges who "legislate from the bench."
Minutes after the president announced the nomination of his friend from Texas, another Texas friend, Robert Jordan, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was on Fox News proclaiming what he and, no doubt, the White House that probably enlisted him for advocacy, considered glad and relevant tidings: Miers, said Jordan, has been a victim. She has been, he said contentedly, "discriminated against" because of her gender.
Her victimization was not so severe that it prevented her from becoming the first female president of a Texas law firm as large as hers, president of the State Bar of Texas and a senior White House official. Still, playing the victim card clarified, as much as anything has so far done, her credentials, which are her chromosomes and their supposedly painful consequences. For this we need a conservative president?"
More than a few staunch conservatives have been hoping that Mz Miers either voluntarily withdraws or is rejected by the selection committee, but I really don't see either scenario coming to pass. The President remains behind her all the way, this is a job worth dying for, and the rank and file Republicans will grumble but swallow. We've also mentioned the fact that being a member of the Supreme Court is not an entry level position to be handed to just anyone, and George is in eloquent agreement that this seemingly very nice lady is in far, far over her head.
But it DOES make the court diversified. Now there will be a relative dummy alongside the geniuses and what is more evidence of true diversification than dumb sitting alongside smart, just like back home in Texas? It's too bad she is not black because that would have made her the perfect candidate. Check the records, and check them well, for who knows; there might very well be that one one-thousanth of negro blood in her lineage and that would render it a done deal.
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