Reason Express

Vol. 8 No. 42

Jeff Taylor | October 25, 2005

In this issue:

1. Miers and Miers to Go
2. Rice and a Hard Place
3. Bush Batting .500 on Nominees
4. Quick Hits
5. New at Reason Online - The Root of the Problem
6. News and Events

1. Miers and Miers to Go

The Harriet Miers nomination is in deep trouble, and the only people who deny it work for the Bush White House. Crucially, the informal visits that Miers has had with senators have not erased doubts about her, only deepened them. Accordingly, it would be a great surprise if she ever goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee on November 7.

Senators are all but sending up flares to the White House to pull Miers by floating the prospect of calling Focus on the Family founder James Dobson before the committee to talk about what he knows about Miers' views on abortion. The chances of that ending well for the Bush White House, or the country for that matter, are slim and none.

Below the water line remain treacherous rocks of constitutional law that Miers does not seem to be the least bit conversant in. The nominee managed to get into a disagreement with prickly committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) on whether she supported the decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, the landmark 1965 right to privacy case. Specter claims she said that she did; Miers denies it. It is certainly possible to craft a reasonable opposition to how Griswold was decided, but Miers' apparent confusion on it speaks to her lack of depth on these very big issues. A disaster awaits.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/10/24/MNG2BFD1UR1.DTL

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2. Rice and a Hard Place

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is clearly pressing for something to happen to Syria now that a U.N. report has implicated top Syrian officials the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. Exactly what that "response from the international system" will be remains up for grabs.

President Bush wants to put the matter before the U.N. Security Council, which sounds like the path to sanctions on Syria. The French, for one, want to put that off for as long as possible, clearly hoping for President Bashar Assad to find some graceful way out of power without U.N. action.