Miers Withdraws?

Was she ever truly a nominee? If you will forgive a bit of paranoia for a moment, is it possible that it was never the intention of the Bush administration to advance her nomination? Is it possible that in their distorted and perverted view of the world, the nomination was offered with the expectation that it would be withdrawn just as Pat Fitzpatrick’s presentation to the grand jury was drawing to a close? It would not be the first (and unfortunately likely not the last) time that the Bush administration abused its responsibilities to the electorate and its broader constituency by playing games with the mechanisms of government.

I can certainly be accused of being paranoid and my suppositions plainly absurd. Nevertheless, this administration has done nothing to earn the right to proclaim with certitude that it would never stoop to such an abuse of process. It may very well be that there is nothing more at play here than the arrogance and ever-increasing incompetence of a lame duck President who hasn’t a clue about his responsibilities under the Constitution to the Country and to the integrity of the Court. This was, after all, a President who either was so full of his self-righteousness or so incredibly incompetent as to defend and support the nomination of his personal lawyer by pointing not to her qualifications as a lawyer but to her qualifications as a Christian. Assuming, again, that this was not entirely a sham nomination, there can be no doubt that when the President announces that, “She’s one of us” in defense of his long-time friend and supporter all Americans lose because we are subject to a President who either cares nothing for the Constitution or is simply so ignorant of the Constitutional limits imposed on his office that he was unaware that is pronouncement violated Article IV, Clause 3 prohibiting the use of a religious test to gauge a nominee’s qualifications. This is, after all, a President who views the government as his personal play thing for rewarding his most loyal friends and supporters with government positions for which they hold no qualification other than their undying loyalty to Mr. Bush and his family and Ms Miers -- in both her loyalty and lack of qualification -- would snuggly fit this mold.

On the other hand…..is it not also reasonable to believe that Bush and his advisors never intended to go through with the Miers’ nomination? Clearly, they must have known that the nomination was doomed from the outset. Beyond the obvious…that she had never served as a judge and provided no indication that she was sufficiently conversant in the Constitution to interpret and apply its anachronistic pronouncements…Bush and his must have known that her service as personal counsel to Bush both before and during his presidency would present a nearly-impenetrable obstacle to overcome. Are we to believe that they only today or recently came to realize that her advice to W would become an issue and that they would never be able to share that information with the Judiciary Committee or was it always and ultimately that stumbling block that Bush intended to use to pull the plug on the nomination. Are we to believe that Miers and her handlers were so inept as to believe that the questionnaire answers submitted to the Committee were genuinely intended to fully respond to its inquiries or were they submitted knowing that because the answers were so obviously superficial and evasive that the questionnaire would be rejected by the committee in order to delay the nomination hearing and buy additional time for W. If all this is true, why would she subject herself to the derision and ridicule directed at her --- particularly by the extreme right --- over the past several weeks? She is, of course, a good soldier in the Bush army and does appear prepared to throw herself in the way of any political bullet aimed at her client and friend and it is not too hard to imagine that that loyalty would have included enduring those slings and arrows of [out]rageous fortune that have been aimed in her direction since her nomination.

To what end has this all been played out we may never know. The timing of all of this does again raise some index of suspicion that there is a whole other game being played out that we are simply not privy to. Whether this has something or anything to do with Rove, Libby, Hadley et al (whether they are indicted or not there is certainly going to be some criticism leveled in the administration’s direction involving the Plame affair and its manipulation of intelligence to control the debate during the run up to the war) or some gambit involving the nomination itself is not clear and, again, may never be known. Nevertheless, the whole thing seems too absurd, even for W and Big Karl, to be what it appears. As always, ignore the man behind the curtain….