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Hewitt rips into Miers’s critics
Hugh Hewitt, The Last Loyalist, has written for the New York Times a weird, tendentious, alarmist, and irrelevant op-ed about the Harriet Miers nomination. He indicts Miers’s conservative critics of having violated the number-one goal of conservatives in recent years for dealing with judicial nominations, that the nominee be allowed an up or down vote in the Senate. But what happened in those earlier nominations was that the Democrats placed obstacles in the path of perfectly qualified candidates, so that they couldn’t come to a vote. That’s not what happened with Miers. She was considered unqualified by her own party, not worth the candle, and she was withdrawn. It wasn’t that she was deprived of a fair process leading up to a Senate vote. It was that she was seen as so clearly unqualified that it wasn’t worth the trouble of moving forward with the process. By Hewitt’s logic, no matter how poor a nominee may be, no matter how much bad blood will be uselessly spilled by hearings and a floor vote, the process must move forward, because, well, because the process must move forward. He also complains about the strong criticisms of her from conservative columnists, as though that represented some violation of the rules. Once again, what he doesn’t grasp is that Miers was an outrageously bad nominee, and so the criticisms were justified. What he’s seems to be saying is that there should be no vigorous debate about a nominee, just a polite stately progress through hearings to a Senate vote. Hewitt even re-circulates the false claim that Miers was opposed because she wasn’t a judge. Nonsense. Had she been a law professor with a background in constitutional law, that would have been fine. It was not her lack of a judgeship that was the problem, but her total lack of any demonstrated experience with or expertise in constitutional issues. Naturally, since Hewitt has gone overboard attacking his fellow Republicans and conservatives, he gets awarded an op-ed in the Times. The Timesians love doing that. It’s like putting a Log Cabin Republican or a pro-choice Republican on the op-ed page during the GOP convention, who self-servingly declares, “I’m a life-long Republican, I love my party. But the Republicans are the biggest bunch of nasty closed-minded bigots I’ve ever seen. The whole bunch has got to be cleared out.”
Indeed, Hewitt is so far off the chart in this op-ed, I’m surprised he didn’t accuse Miers’s critics of sexism. Email entry |