Harriet Miers Withdraws

The withdrawal of White House Counsel Harriet Miers from consideration by the United States Senate to be confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States is indeed welcome news. Miss Miers is clearly a very conflicted person, the product of all of the conflicting philosophies and religions that vie in the much-heralded “market place of ideas” in the cultural pluralism begotten by the devil and exploited by him for his evil purposes at every turn.

To wit, Howard Phillips, the Chairman of the Conservative Caucus Foundation, noted recently in his Howard Phillips Issues and Strategies Bulletin, that Miss Miers, who had abandoned Catholicism to join an evangelical sect (from which she recently broke away to join yet another sect, although she attends an Episcopal church on most Sundays when in Washington, D.C., as does her Methodist boss, President George W. Bush), donated to the political action committee of the law firm she managed in Dallas, Texas, that days later sent a donation to the Senatorial campaign of then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2000.

“On May 17, 2000, while Harriet Miers was managing the law firm of Locke Liddell from the firm’s Dallas office, she contributed $415 to the law firm’s political action committee.  Federal Election Commission reports show that two days later, Locke Liddell’s PAC contributed $1,000 to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate Campaign Committee.  For an unexplained reason, Harriet Miers listed herself as a ‘self-employed attorney,’ according to the FEC Report on her 2000 contribution to the Locke Liddell PAC.”

How does one is who purported by her friends to be “privately” pro-life support Hillary Clinton for anything after having worked for a man, then Texas Governor George W. Bush who was  running for the office, the Presidency of the United States,  that his father held when he was defeated by Mrs. Clinton’s husband in 1992? Although she says that she had become a Republican to support Ronald Reagan in the 1990s, Phillips reported that Miss Miers gave donations in the 1990s to the campaigns of President Bill Clinton and Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr.   Miers’s confusion is such that she told an audience in 1993 that “reproductive freedom” was a matter of “individual self-determination” even though she had said in 1989 while running for the Dallas City Council that she was “pro-life.” Such contradictions defy all rational explanation. And that is precisely what happens in a world where Catholicism is only “one of many” beliefs in the “marketplace of ideas.” The irrationality of mutually contradictory ideas held by the same person becomes the norm, not the exception.

President George W. Bush does not recognize this as a flaw. Indeed, he shares Miss Miers’s fundamentally conflicted nature, which is probably one of the reasons for his great admiration of her. Bush demonstrated his own irrationality quite specifically when Dr. Alan Keyes pressed him in a televised debate in December of 1999 as to how he could explain saying that he, Bush, was pro-life while he supported abortion in cases of rape, incest, and alleged threats to a mother’s life.

Peeved at being asked to explain this inconsistency, Bush smirked and said, “I can’t explain it. It’s just how I feel.”

As I have noted in earlier commentaries on the Miers nomination, Protestantism gives rise to theological relativism and religious indifferentism as the prevailing norms of civil society. Judeo-Masonry built on the foundation laid by the Protestant Revolt, cementing it by the use of various slogans, most notably “freedom of religion,” the false principle enshrined in Article VI and the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Harriet Miers is simply a case study in the confusion of a world steeped in the confusion sewn by hell over the course of the past 500 years.

All of this having been reiterated for the umpteenth time, it is important to take note of the tremendous posturing going on in the aftermath of Miss Miers’s withdrawal on Thursday, October 27, 2005.

Senators from both major political parties were very publicly critical of Harriet Miers’s grasp of constitutional law in the three weeks between the time of her nomination on October 3, 2005, and her withdrawal twenty-four days later. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter said that Miers was going to need a “crash course in constitutional law” before she could perform adequately during her confirmation hearings. Both Specter and his equally reprehensible fellow pro-abort, Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent a letter to Miers on Wednesday, October 17, 2005, asking her to redo the questionnaire that the committee had sent her to complete, stating her answers were incomplete and, at times, insulting.

Lo and behold, however, Specter was among the first on October 27, 2005, to call Miers’s withdrawal “disgraceful,” blaming the “radical right” for poisoning the atmosphere of a nomination that many senators were saying privately was in trouble purely on the grounds of her lack of knowledge of constitutional issues.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said from the floor of the United States Senate that President Bush had caved in to the pressures brought by hard-core conservatives. Senator Charles Schumer, who I would have had the opportunity to debate had I won my 1998 Right to Life Party primary against then Senator Alfonse M. D’Amato, told President Bush to “take his time” and “get it right” before sending another nomination to the Senate to replace Ronald Reagan’s first appointee to the Court, Sandra Day O’Connor.

There is a purpose to all of this posturing and preening on the part of pro-abortion senators: they are disingenuously blaming “the radical right” for Miers’s withdrawal despite their own conviction that she was simply not qualified to serve on the Court because they are sending a shot across the bow, warning Bush not to nominate someone who would be viewed “favorably” by the “radical right.” It is all posturing and preening signifying nothing.

Bush is also posturing. Miers claimed that she was withdrawing her nomination so as to avoid a “constitutional crisis” that might erupt as a result of the White House’s refusal to release documents related to her work for the President. Miers further claimed that she was upholding the doctrine of executive privilege by withdrawing her nomination. Of course. Miss Miers’s withdrawal had nothing to do with the fact that there was a groundswell of opposition to her in the Senate and that she could not adequately complete the questionnaire that had been sent to her. Sure.

It is probably the case that Bush and his people, preoccupied with the investigation into the leak of Central Intelligence Agency agent Valerie Plame’s name to the media by someone in the White House, either Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove or Vice Presidential now indicted and freshly resigned Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Jr., did not want to release documents about Miers’s views on the torture of prisoners in the “war on terrorism” and her support of women in combat and related issues.

 More to the point, though, is the fact that Bush had been told by senators that the Miers nomination was not going to fly, thus necessitating him to find some sanctimoniously righteous cover under which he could veil the truth and pretend to be defending the constitutional rights of the Executive Office of the President of the United States.

A constitutional system that admits of no higher authority than the words of the synthetic document under which it operates will always be the prisoner of narcissistic careerists who preen and posture in order to obfuscate the truth and to promote agendas contrary to the actual common good of a country and to the eternal good of souls. It is thus important as we approach the Feast of the Universal Kingship of Jesus Christ this Sunday, October 30, to remember that those who ignore the rights of Our Lord to reign as King of societies through His true Church will be consigned to the dustbin of history as blind fools unable to see natural truths clearly, no less maintain steadfast fidelity to the Deposit of Faith that has been entrusted solely to the Catholic Church.

Vivat Christus Rex!