Editor’s Note:  When The Remnant decided not to endorse George W. Bush’s run for the White House in 2000 or his bid for re-election in 2004, we were dragged over hot burning coals by our critics for failing to “see the bigger picture”—those all important conservative appointments to the Supreme Court that Mr. Bush had promised would be forthcoming.  With the recent retirement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and the passing of Justice William Rehnquist, President Bush found himself with an historic opportunity on his hands…an opportunity for which many pro-life Republicans had been waiting most of their adult lives.  With a Republican majority in the Senate, a Republican president was at last in a position to change history at the Supreme Court level.  And, yet, what did President Bush do? He delighted  Democrats and devastated his loyal base by nominating his pal, Harriet Miers, who is reportedly on record as a supporter of the International Criminal Court, women in combat and homosexual adoption. And let's not forget that John Roberts was widely criticized by conservative groups also, especially for having defended Playboy Entertainment Group as well as homosexual rights legislation, while insisting publicly that the Roe v. Wade precedent is "entitled to respect". These appointments have prompted even many ardent Bush supporters to wonder what exactly "conservative" means to Mr. Bush. Needless to say, we  stand by our decisions in 2000 and 2004.  MJM

The hubbub around the White House on the morning of October 3, 2005, was quite noticeable. Television camera crews were poised on the north lawn of the White House, juxtaposed away from the West Wing. “Something’s going on here,” I noted to my wife Sharon as we took our dear daughter Lucy Mary Norma on an unexpected stroll down Pennsylvania Avenue to show her where the leader of the United States of America lives and works. Something was indeed going on at the White House: another pathetic nomination was being made by President George W. Bush to serve as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The nomination of White House Counsel Harriet Miers to replace the late President Ronald Wilson Reagan’s first appointee to the Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor, is as predictable as it is pathetic.

The predictability in the Miers nomination is to be found in the simple fact that her friend and political mentor, George W. Bush, appointed people like her to the Texas state judiciary all of the time, including out-and-out pro-aborts and pro-sodomites, when he was Governor of Texas between January of 1995 and December of 2000. I can’t even count the number of articles I wrote in Christ or Chaos in 1999 and 2000 that detailed Governor Bush’s record of judicial appointees in Texas as a fairly reliable indicator of what he would do if elected to the Presidency of the United States. A man who believes that “abortion is a difficult issue about which people of ‘good will’ can disagree” is not going to surround himself with people who understand that no country can survive long if it endorses with legal impunity the chemical and surgical executions of millions upon millions of innocent preborn children. Such a man will surround himself with people who support this evil openly and without qualification (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Andrew Card, Donald Rumsfeld, Christine Todd Whitman, Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff).

Remember, ladies and gentlemen, George W. Bush has campaigned actively for pro-aborts in his own political party. He has campaigned for the rabidly pro-abortion Mayor of the City of New York, Michael Bloomberg, and for the Catholic pro-abortion Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others. He endorsed the re-nomination of pro-abortion Senator Arlen Specter in a Republican primary last year over a partly pro-life, partly pro-abortion challenger, then Representative Pat Toomey. He has campaigned with the Catholic pro-abortion former Mayor of the City of New York, Rudolph William Giuliani. He believes that it is morally licit and legally just to kill babies in certain cases (rape, incest, alleged threats to the life of mothers). His administration funds the surgical murder of preborn children by means of domestic and international “family planning programs” more than did the Clinton-Gore administration. It is thus eminently predictable that President George W. Bush would nominate a woman who has donated in the past to pro-abortion candidates (Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., in 1988, and Lloyd Bentsen, also in 1988) and to the completely pro-abortion Democratic Party.

The pathetic nature of the Miers nomination is that George W. Bush sees no advantage to using his party’s ten vote majority in the United States Senate to nominate the sort of person most of those who voted for him were misled into believing he would select to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States. Yes, there are five fully pro-abortion Republicans in the United States Senate (Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins, Arlen Specter, Lincoln Chaffee, Kay Bailey Hutchison). Only three of these, though (Snowe, Specter, Chaffee), would likely bolt from Bush if he nominated someone who is avowedly pro-life. What’s Bush going to do when the most liberal member of the Court, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens (nominated by the thirty-third degree Mason named Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr., in 1975) dies or retires? Nominate his completely pro-abortion Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, who had been nominated by Bush to serve on the Circuit Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in 2003? Nominate Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who voted to invalidate a mere parental notification bill in Texas when he served as the Chief Justice of the Texas Supreme Court?

No, the pathetic nature of the Miers nomination is just part and parcel of the unwillingness of President George W. Bush to use his political capital in the attempt to restore full legal protection to the preborn. He has squandered too much of his political capital on the reckless enterprise of placing American men and women needlessly in harm’s way to pursue the Zionist-inspired intervention in Iraq. He cannot use what remains of it to pick a battle with Democrats over an issue his actions demonstrate that he does not consider to be worth risking any more points in the public opinion polls.

Thus, Bush selected John Roberts, first to replace Sandra Day O’Connor and then to replace Chief Justice William Rehnquist after the latter’s death in August. Roberts, a Catholic, has no guiding convictions. He is a positivist who takes a “pragmatic” view of the “rule of law” without regard to overarching truths, the logical and inexorable result of a world based upon the abject reject of the Social Reign of Christ the King as it is exercised by the Catholic Church. No believing Catholic could consider it to be in the service of the advancement of the common good and the honor and glory of God to do any sort of work to support legal cases brought by a pornographic empire and/or by those steeped in the promotion of unrepentant perversity as a matter of legal right. Roberts had no problem with that in private practice. Bush had no problem with him over such work as he himself has no problem, ultimately, with “free expression” and “diversity.”

Patrick J. Buchanan has commented that Miers comes to the confirmation process with no paper trail, comparing her lack of a paper trail to that of President George Herbert Walker Bush’s first nominee to serve on the Supreme Court, David Souter, in 1990. Pat, my friend, you are wrong. Ann Coulter was just as wrong in early July when making the same claim about Souter. Souter had a track record on abortion. He has a stronger one now, to be sure. However, he had a pretty clear track record back in 1990.

The Chairman of the Conservative Caucus Foundation, Howard Phillips, whose conversion to the true Faith we must pray for very fervently, testified before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee that Souter had voted to permit “elective abortions” at a hospital on whose board of directors he served. Souter had the blood of the innocent dripping on his blue-blood hands. Souter did indeed have a track record. Howard Phillips’s testimony mattered not to the allegedly “pro-life” Senators in the Republican Party, just as Sandra Day O’Connor’s support for baby-killing as the Majority Leader of the Arizona State Senate mattered not one whit to Republicans in 1981 when Phillips and American Life League President Judie Brown presented the proof of her record to the Judiciary Committee.

Apart from being a “ground-breaking” female attorney in Texas, Harriet Miers has distinguished herself in one category: complete and total loyalty to George W. Bush. The facts that she has supported pro-abortion politicians with her money should send a clear signal to Republican “true believers” that there will never be a time when there will be a President of the United States who will consider any and all levels of support for baby-killing to be an absolute prohibition to the holding of any governmental position, whether elected or appointed.

Columnist Joseph Farah of World Net Daily has also documented the following about Harriet Miers: she submitted a report for the American Bar Association in 1999 in which she recommended “enactment of laws and public policy providing that the sexual orientation of adults be no bar to adoption of children.” Mr. Farah quotes Elaine Donnelly, President of the Center for Military Readiness, that Miss Miers has as White House Counsel either approved of the Department of Defense's illegal assignments of women in units required to be all-male, which is still continuing in violation of the law requiring notice to Congress in advance, or she was oblivious to the legal consequences of those assignments.” Mr. Farah goes on to comment on this, saying, “Donnelly believes the actions of Miers could lead directly to a future court ruling requiring women to register with the Selective Service for the draft because they are now being, against the wishes of Congress, assigned to land combat.”

Who among you wants to see our daughters (and I am the father of a young girl) forced to register for the draft and to serve in combat in the military to advance the imperialist goals of this and future American administrations? “Associate Justice” Harriet Miers will see to it that they are indeed forced to do precisely this. Those of us who protest that women bear within them the image of Our Lady and should never be forced into military service, much less active combat, will be sent to jail for refusing to participate in this forthcoming venture into the brave new world of American totalitarianism, as I wrote fourteen months ago.

Oh, yes, Harriet Miers is shaping up to be the crystallization of everything that those of us who were said to be opposed to the “good” in pursuit of the “perfect” have been warning Catholics about for the past six years. Is there any believing Catholic out there now who still wants to insist that George W. Bush is the friend of preborn babies and of limited government?

It is time for believing Catholics to stop believing in the political equivalent of the tooth fairy. The Republican Party, as I demonstrate in a collection of articles in Restoring Christ as the King of All Nations (the first of a three volume collection of such articles), is not interested in the subordination of public policy to the binding precepts of the Divine positive law and the natural law. How can it be? The very foundation of our Constitution leads to the election of men such as George W. Bush and the appointment of positivists and pragmatists to the nation’s highest court. A nation that does not recognize Christ as King and respect the right of His true Church, after the exercise of her Indirect Power of teaching and preaching and exhortation, to interpose herself as a last resort to nullify unjust governmental decrees and actions that put into jeopardy the salvation of souls is bound to produce petty and intellectually shallow careerists who are concerned only about the pursuit and retention of power as their raison d’etre.