Whilst perusing the internet once again, sifting through the legion of “1s” and “0s”, I found the following article from the Wall Street Journal — occasionally a bastion of right-thinking editorial philosophies. In this piece, Robert Bork (he of the “Borked” origin) writes about the nomination by President Bush of Harriet E. Miers to the US Supreme Court.

Now, consider that many persons on the right side of the aisle have taken Mr. Bush to task for this nomination — most prominently the National Review and the Weekly Standard — both right wing bastions; and myself as well (see my Tuesday, 10-18-05 post). In retrospect, I have nothing on Mr. Bork when he writes, in his very first paragraph from the article:

With a single stroke–the nomination of Harriet Miers–the president has damaged the prospects for reform of a left-leaning and imperialistic Supreme Court, taken the heart out of a rising generation of constitutional scholars, and widened the fissures within the conservative movement. That’s not a bad day’s work–for liberals.

Eeee-yow! Not bad — if you’re Vlad the Impaler. Instead of pulling the pike through the wound, Bork may as well pull it back out the way it came:

There is, to say the least, a heavy presumption that Ms. Miers, though undoubtedly possessed of many sterling qualities, is not qualified to be on the Supreme Court. It is not just that she has no known experience with constitutional law and no known opinions on judicial philosophy. It is worse than that. As president of the Texas Bar Association, she wrote columns for the association’s journal. David Brooks of the New York Times examined those columns. He reports, with supporting examples, that the quality of her thought and writing demonstrates absolutely no “ability to write clearly and argue incisively.”

Holy crap. As a child I used to salt snails and take a magnifying glass to slugs — but I outgrew that. Bork continues:

By passing over the many clearly qualified persons, male and female, to pick a stealth candidate, George W. Bush has sent a message to aspiring young originalists that it is better not to say anything remotely controversial, a sort of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” admonition to would-be judges. It is a blow in particular to the Federalist Society, most of whose members endorse originalism. The society, unlike the ACLU, takes no public positions, engages in no litigation, and includes people of differing views in its programs. It performs the invaluable function of making law students, in the heavily left-leaning schools, aware that there are respectable perspectives on law other than liberal activism. Yet the society has been defamed in McCarthyite fashion by liberals; and it appears to have been important to the White House that neither the new chief justice nor Ms. Miers had much to do with the Federalists.

In many ways President Bush is like most conservatives; in some very unsettling ways he is like many Democrats. I fear that some of his recent conciliatory moves (new immigration reform emphasis) are too little, too late — and is posturing at best. When he stands to place more Border Patrol agents on our southern lines (and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center in Glynco, GA can only kick out 1,500 per year), he leaves totally unaddressed the issue of federal court judges sufficient to hear the number of immigration cases that would come before that bench. As one Border Patrol agent said: “We can make all the arrests we want; they’ll just get kicked because we can’t hear them and handle them.”

Heavy sigh.