Rebel Alliance On Final Approach To Death Star

The Death Star being in this case the nomination of Harriet Miers. Not the Bush Administration. We hope.

Jonah Goldberg reacts today to Miers Backed Race, Sex Set-Asides, which details her support for affirmative action during her tenure at the Texas bar association. Goldberg:

After reading this story I'm officially against Miers. I'm with the Editors , Will, Frum, and Krauthammer.

It's not just that Miers was in favor of racial quotas -- we'd pretty much known that for a while. It's the fundamental confirmation that she's a go-along-with-the-crowd establishmentarian. The White House says that her enthusiastic support for goals, timetables and quotas at the Bar Association says nothing about her views on government race policies. Yeah, right. She simultaneously thought what she was doing was great and important while also believing it would be unconstitutional if the government did the same thing.

The White House says she's an unchanging rock of principle. Uh huh. So have her opinions held constant since the early 1990s? Or have they shifted with the wind? If she's a rock, I don't want her. If she's a weather vane, I don't want her.

I just don't want her.

Start over.

For my part, when people were talking about Miers' reference to a non-existent "proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection clause," I suggested that it might reflect a mind that is comfortable with quotas. And that was enough for me.

Also for people who actually matter. From today's story about Miers' support for set-asides:

"Those are quotas," said Roger Clegg, the general counsel for the Center for Equal Opportunity, a conservative group opposed to affirmative action. The fact that Miers "did not create the quota systems but only perpetuated and endorsed it doesn't make it less disturbing," he said.

Meanwhile George Will arrives at the same destination via a different route.

Update: Linked to Wizbang's generous Carnival of Trackbacks and equally nifty open trackbacks at Political Teen.

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Comments

[Michael]

Feh. "Has a mind comfortable with quotas and that's enough for me" suggests a results-oriented mindset. I prefer process: is she a smart enough cookie to play footsie with Clarence Thomas?

The LA Times (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-miers22oct22,0,1244386.story?coll=la-home-headlines) thingie today includes this:

Meirs says: >> At one point, Miers described her service on the Dallas City Council in 1989. When the city was sued on allegations that it violated the Voting Rights Act, she said, "the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause." <<

Smarty-pants says: >>"That's a terrible answer. There is no proportional representation requirement under the equal protection clause," said New York University law professor Burt Neuborne, a voting rights expert. "If a first-year law student wrote that and submitted it in class, I would send it back and say it was unacceptable."<<

And the gritty White House defense is: >>White House officials say the term "proportional representation" is "amenable to different meanings." They say Miers was referring to the requirement that election districts have roughly the same number of voters. <<

That's it? The best they have now is "this woman applying for the job of 11.1% of the Final Say on all things constitutional is said to have used a phrase on her job application which indicated a complete misconstruing of what is 'constitutional'; we beg to differ. She was simply using the phrase to mean something other than what people who think about the constitution mean by it, she was using the phrase to mean 'similar in number', perhaps, or perhaps she meant 'butterscotch' or 'sugar and spice and everything nice'.