Joseph Sobran’s
Washington Watch

The New Nominee

(Reprinted from the issue of October 13, 2005)

The week after John Roberts was sworn in as chief justice of the United States, to general acclaim for his distinguished record and brilliant mind, President Bush crossed everybody up by nominating Harriet Miers to fill the seat Sandra Day O’Connor is retiring from.

Nobody knows enough about her to say whether she has any qualifications or any judicial philosophy; she has never even been a judge, just a partisan Republican lawyer who has served as Bush’s personal attorney and White House counsel.

Republicans and Democrats in the Senate seemed equally baffled. There seemed no way to dope out her views on the question at the heart of today’s judge wars: abortion.

But conservatives feared she might be another O’Connor or even a Souter, lying low and packing some unpleasant surprises for later, when confirmation will free her from any responsibility to construe the Constitution sensibly.

Bush himself vouched for her in typically unilluminating terms: “I’ve known Harriet for more than a decade. I know her heart. I know her character.”

Not very reassuring. We’re still trying to figure out what Roberts will do about Roe v. Wade, and Bush expects support for a woman whose record offers even fewer clues? He praised her “unwavering devotion to the Constitution,” but what on earth does he mean by that? In which of her capacities — personal attorney or White House counsel — would she have had occasion to exhibit that devotion? Or is this just a bit of Bush hyperbole?

To put it bluntly, Miss Miers has no known distinction as a reader of the Constitution. The praise of one old friend — Bush, who shows no such distinction either — hardly amounts to a qualification for the Supreme Court. Her chief credential seems to be that she is a woman, in an administration haunted by demands for “diversity.”

After all, Justice O’Connor herself made only one objection when Roberts was picked to replace her: He wasn’t a woman! She felt (“thought” would be too strong a word) that “her” seat should be passed on to one of her own sex.

It chills the blood to reflect that such a mind as that should have wielded such power for so many years. Maybe the only argument for confirming Harriet Miers is that she could hardly be any worse, or less fit for the position, than her predecessor.
 
Bush’s Priorities

The day Miss Miers’s nomination was announced, I spoke with a shrewd and well-connected Catholic observer who doesn’t know her, but took her selection as a bad sign. He has regretfully come to the conclusion that there is no real hope of reversing Roe.

I’m afraid I agree. Bush never had any serious intention of putting up the kind of fight that would take, and whatever enthusiasm he may once have had has long since been diverted to his futile war in Iraq.

Everyone knows that Bush strongly disapproves of abortion; but at the same time, everyone knows that it just isn’t a high priority with him. He has said he wants to be thought of as “a war president” or even, echoing his father, as “an education president.”

Such is the glory he aspires to; he has never thought of abortion as the critical question for his presidency. It has been just one of several questions — “issues,” as they are called — in the Karl Rove calculus.

So now Bush finds himself in the awkward stance of trying to convince his own base that he isn’t letting them down by nominating Miss Miers to the Court. That base wasn’t reassured when Harry Reid, the Senate minority leader, quickly gave her the approval he’d denied to John Roberts.
 
Bennett’s Logic

Yet another Bill Bennett controversy! In so many words, he raised the explosive idea of aborting black babies to reduce the crime rate, and it made no difference at all that he called that idea “reprehensible.” To hear the liberal reaction, you’d think he’d called it “delightful.”

I could understand the outrage if liberals, for the last generation, had been condemning abortion — any abortion — as a horrible thing.

But such is not my recollection. I seem to recall them as giving it their hearty approval, calling it a precious constitutional right, and damning those who would limit its exercise, even when the baby is on the verge of birth and “abortion” is nothing but the most brutal infanticide.

Oh, sure, some Catholic liberals have said they are “personally opposed” to it, but you don’t find them picketing abortion mills very often. Other liberals, even feminists, sometimes express mild regret that the practice is ever necessary, but ...

Bennett was guilty of committing logic. If you want to make liberals mad, the surest way to do it is to point out where their own positions lead.

And Bennett cited a recent book, titled Freakonomics, which argues that legal abortion has in fact cut the crime rate, though its authors, drawn into the fray, defensively point out that they were writing about “poor” people, not “black” people, as the relevant demographic. Why, race hadn’t even crossed their minds! “Black” and “poor” are totally discrete categories, as the coverage of Hurricane Katrina should have reminded us.

In other words, we’re seeing a pileup at the crossroads where liberal hypocrisies — about abortion and race — intersect. Bennett might have walked away unscathed if he’d said that aborting white babies would reduce the incidence of hate crimes. What liberal could argue with that?
 
Defending Virtue

Ever since he published his best-seller The Book of Virtues, Bennett has been the target of a persistent cheap shot liberals are particularly fond of: that he claims to be an exemplar of virtue. When his weakness for gambling came to light, how they hooted!

Well, as John O’Sullivan has written, “The defense of virtue must not be left to the virtuous.” There aren’t enough saints to do the job.

All of us must honor virtue, and even pipe up for it, despite our own imperfections. To accuse a man of claiming all the virtues he praises makes no more sense than accusing him of committing all the sins he deprecates.

It just goes to show that nowadays defending virtue can damage your reputation.


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Joseph Sobran