Time magazine suggests Miers will be "very much like O'Connor"

[highplainsdem]

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1115621,00.html

The Two Knocks on Miers
And why—surprise!—they're both coming from the right. And why, even so, they might not derail her
By NANCY GIBBS

Posted Sunday, Oct. 09, 2005

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Now the anger and ironies wrap around each other. By picking someone he knew so well, Bush hoped to avoid making the kind of miscalculation his father had made with David Souter, yet now he stands accused of doing just that. And by avoiding a costly fight with the left, Bush gets one with the right. Conservatives find themselves struggling with whether they really want to whack their President when he's already down and go on the record opposing a devout Evangelical whom he trusts completely. Fight him and lose, and they prove how powerless they are to affect much of anything that counts; swallow hard and fall in line, and what good is their access anyway? By contrast, the Democrats—looking smug and convinced they have dodged a bullet with Miers' selection—actually had it easy.

<snip>

To his skeptical conservative allies, Bush did chant the litany. "She will not legislate from the bench," he vowed. "I've known her long enough to know she's not going to change," Bush said, a code for "No more Souters." Bush may be right, but Miers got to be her resolute self after undergoing a profound change. Raised a Catholic, she was reborn an Evangelical in 1979, and it was to her spiritual credentials that her surrogates pointed in trying to reassure conservative Christians that she could be trusted. But that was not enough for activists like Janet LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for America. "Jimmy Carter claims to be an Evangelical," she says, "and I wouldn't want to have him on the Supreme Court."

The people most familiar with her legal instincts did not provide much reassurance. "My theory is that she is going to be a Justice very much like Sandra Day O'Connor," says Gary Rice, in words that might cheer moderates but spook anyone looking for someone with a weed whacker who will go after liberal rulings of the past 30 years.

"If she moves the law, it will be in small steps. She won't be one to say, 'Let's just throw all that out and do something different.'" One of the most intriguing insights into the Real Harriet Miers came from her longtime friend, former law partner and sometime love interest Justice Nathan Hecht, who is considered the most conservative justice on the Texas Supreme Court. "This is very important, and I don't think the public understands," he told TIME. "When you take an oath and swear that you will judge cases properly after that, you can't inject your personal views or religious faith into decisions because it would be wrong. You would either be a bad Christian or a bad judge. Religion says a lot about who you are personally, but it says nothing about stare decisis , the commerce clause, the First Amendment, search and seizure or any of the issues she's going to deal with." All of which will surely leave some Christian activists wondering, What's the good of having the first Evangelical on the bench if she leaves her faith in the robing room?

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This is a 4-page article, with the first paragraph I quoted from page 1 and the other three paragraphs from pages 3 and 4.

Gary Rice, who's mentioned in the 3rd paragraph I've quoted, is identified on page 2 of the article as a college classmate of Miers. A Dallas Morning News article last week identified him as "a Dallas lawyer who worked on the law journal with her at Southern Methodist University."

[jobycom]

1. Nathan Hecht then needs to explain Bush v Gore by his theory

We all understand that a judge isn't supposed to inject their personal views or religious faith into decisios, and that they are supposed to "judge cases properly." We all also understand that five of the nine justices in Bush v Gore pulled a decision out of their ass and tried to paste judicial precedences and excuses to that decision that just didn't even come close to fitting.

The issue with Miers is more that she has absolutely no experience making judicial decisions. Her entire life has been as an advocate of one view over another, and she's been in position for many years to support HER personal view over the opposition's. That's exactly the opposite of what we need on the Supreme Court.

In other words, Nathan, there is no law against a Supreme Court Justice applying his or her personal opinion to a decision, rather than making a judicial decision. It's been done often enough. It was done on December 12th, 2000, and that is why our nation is in a death spiral as it is. We need a justice that has proven his or her ability to judge according to the law. Harriet Miers has no such proof, in any way. THAT's exactly the problem.

And listening to Nathan Hecht explain what makes a good judge is like listening to George Bush describe what makes a good soldier.