Where to start? With Miers, of course.
Seems that back in 1989, Harriet Miers supported a ban on all abortions except when the mother's life was in danger.
No one should really be surprised at this news. Bush was never going to nominate a moderate or anyone willing to put their personal beliefs aside in favor of the rule of law.
So now the far righters can breathe a sigh of relief and rush to confirm. And what of the Democrats? We've got a Minority Leader in the Senate who praised Miers the moment she was nominated and in fact bragged that he recommended her to Bush. How much of a fight are they going to put up now?
I say we should flood the Minority Leader's office with calls, letters and e-mails demanding his resignation as the leader of the Senate Democrats for his support of Miers. Reid himself is anti-choice and he seems to have made sure he recommended someone to Bush who held the same beliefs.
The danger with Miers is that all we really have to go on are her personal views. She hasn't ever been a Judge, so we have no way of knowing how she'll let those personal views affect her rulings. But given the views she has and the crowd she hangs around with, we can assume the worst.
We can assume that she'll help set back the clock on a woman's right to choose, on gay rights, and on civil rights in general. We can assume that she'll be a great friend to big business over individual citizens, and a supporter of the tyranny of the Administration she's served over all of our civil liberties.
And we can assume she'll do all this not based on a fair assessment of the law, but on political and ideological reasoning. That sort of Judicial activism has no place on any of our courts, let alone the highest one.
I'd have no problem with Miers or anyone who is personally anti-choice being appointed to the Supreme Court if they had a record that demonstrated that they put the law above personal ideology. No one should be blocked from any job based on personal views. But they should be blocked when they're going to make all decisions based on those views and nothing else.
These aren't abstract issues. These are people's very lives at stake. How many women will die from botched back alley abortions if these neo cons get their way?
This is my very life at stake. Forget for just a moment about the rights I should have but don't yet like the right to marry the person I love someday, or adopt a child anywhere in the country. My very right to have sex with another guy in my own bedroom could be taken away. It was only just officially guaranteed a couple of years ago, remember. My right not to be fired from a job (or to be hired at all) because of my sexuality could be taken away.
These are issues that matter to millions of real people in this country, and the Senate Democrats seem to be doing nothing about it. They need to oppose and filibuster Miers and any other nominee who either can't demonstrate they won't be an extremist on the court of has already demonstrated they will be.
I know how we got stuck with this gang of incompetent thugs in the White House. Some old fashioned electoral fraud (not once, but twice!) took care of that. But how did a putz like Harry Reid end up as the leader of the left in the Senate?
Oh, yeah! Duh. I forgot. The 'left' is more than just the minority in the Senate (and the House, for that matter). They're in the minority of the minority!
Most of the Democrats in Congress are Centrists like Hillary Clinton. Many aren't even really of the left at all. Look at Joe Lieberman. Look at that old homophobe, Robert Byrd!
With Democrats like them serving, it's no wonder they chose a guy like Harry Reid to be their leader.
They're are probably about 15 Democrats in the Senate who can be relied upon most of the time to be reasonably liberal, maybe 20 if we really stretch our definition. Even those 15-20 disappoint more often than not. In the House, there are probably 30-40.
This is a sorry state of affairs. Why do we let these men & women get elected time and again? We need to send a message next year and send some truly progressive people to Washington to start kicking some ass!
Look, the current Supreme Court is a very aged group. Chances are, Bush could nominated 1 or 2 more Justices. Hopefully, if that happens, it'll be AFTER the mid term elections. We'll have had another chance to change the make up of the Senate and put people in there who will really oppose far right nominees, to the point of stopping them from being confirmed.
Let's take a serious look at the 2006 Senate races and see what we can do. And that doesn't mean supporting Democrats and opposing Republicans. It means supporting progressive candidates and opposing Center/Right candidates, no matter their party.
Kick Joe Lieberman out of office in Connecticut. Kick Bill Nelson out of office in Florida and Ben Nelson out of office in Nebraska. And for God's sake, let's not give Robert Byrd another term! I don't oppose any candidate based on their age or the amount of time they've already served. If they're doing a good job, let them keep doing it. But Byrd, though he may have scored some points by speaking out against the Iraq war, is a homophobic relic. So let's kick him out.
We need to replace Republicans with liberals, but we also need to replace many Democrats with liberals. If we just keep sending back the same people, or their ideological clones, we're the ones who are enabling all this.
I wanted to talk about several things tonight, but I guess I climbed up on my soap box and now it's getting late.
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