Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Miers Nomination

I was going to wait till the confirmation hearing to decide whether or not to support the latest Supreme Court nomination. Over the past week I've been leading toward the conclusion that I could not support Harriet Miers. Today's commentary by Robert Bork has led me to conclude that I don't support her nomination. Consider this from Robert Bork:
"But that is only part of the damage Mr. Bush has done. For the past 20 years conservatives have been articulating the philosophy of originalism, the only approach that can make judicial review democratically legitimate. Originalism simply means that the judge must discern from the relevant materials--debates at the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist Papers and Anti-Federalist Papers, newspaper accounts of the time, debates in the state ratifying conventions, and the like--the principles the ratifiers understood themselves to be enacting. The remainder of the task is to apply those principles to unforeseen circumstances, a task that law performs all the time. Any philosophy that does not confine judges to the original understanding inevitably makes the Constitution the plaything of willful judges."
Should the confirmation hearing actually take place, I suppose I might change my mind. But I cannot support the nomination of anyone to the Court that does not understand, and is not clearly committed to, the principles people thought they were putting into our Constitution when the text or its amendments were ratified.

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