Justice Miers — Or Not
Harriet Miers’ prospects of a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court seem to be dimming. Josh Marshall (oy! again with the Josh Marshall!) points to the Intrade trading page on Miers-confirmation futures, and quotes from an Intrade press release as follows:
“The Miers confirmation contract was trading at 92, meaning a 92% probability of confirmation last week. Early this week the contract slid to 64 then this morning with no warning droped to 20 in heavy trading”, says Mike Knesevitch, Communication Director at Intrade.
Meanwhile, Rogers Cadenhead at Workbench points out that Irish betting service Insports shows Miers’ odds of confirmation taking a definite turn for the worse: Harriet Miers in a Bear Market.
Rounding out this morning’s Miers tout sheet are these two items: William J. Stuntz in The New Republic Online: Harriet Miers and Dan Quayle, and David Brooks from his NY Times column of a week ago, which has managed to escape the clutches of TimesSelect: In her own words, Miers makes weak case. From the latter:
I don’t know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers’ prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It’s not that Miers didn’t attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the underrepresentation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of goodwill come together to eliminate bad things.
Or as she puts it, “There is always a necessity to tend to a myriad of responsibilities on a number of cases as well as matters not directly related to the practice of law.” And yet, “Disciplining ourselves to provide the opportunity for thought and analysis has to rise again to a high priority.”
Throw aside ideology. Surely the threshold skill required of a Supreme Court justice is the ability to write clearly and argue incisively. Miers’ columns provide no evidence of that.
