Miers Madness redux: It keeps getting worse

No one can let this go.

And why not? The White House finds ever more fantastic ways to keep scorching the Earth of the Republican Party Faithful.

Captain Ed of the often immitated, never duplicated Captains Quarters notes the latest hit-and-run strategy: cover opponents with the "sexist" label and keep touting Ms. Miers glass-ceiling shattering ways. Behold:

Perhaps people haven't looked at her accomplishments because this White House has been completely inept at promoting them. We have heard about her work in cleaning up the Texas Lottery Commission, her status as the first woman to lead the Texas Bar Association, and her leadership as the managing partner of a large Texas law firm. Given that conservatives generally don't trust trial lawyers and the Bar Association and are at best ambivalent to government sponsorship of gambling, those sound rather weak as arguments for a nomination to the Supreme Court. If Miers has other accomplishments that indicate why conservatives should trust Bush in her nomination, we've yet to hear that from the White House.

Instead, we get attacked for our supposed "sexism", which does more to marginalize conservatives than anything the Democrats have done over the past twenty years -- and it's so demonstrably false that one wonders if the President has decided to torch his party out of a fit of pique. After all, it wasn't our decision to treat the O'Connor seat as a quota fulfillment; that seems to have originated with the First Lady herself, a form of sexism all its own.

As if that's not enough, the President has now played the religion card:

Bush defended his nomination, saying Miers was highly qualified, a trailblazer in the law in Texas and someone who would strictly interpret the Constitution - something his conservative supporters want evidence to support. He said his advisers' comments about Miers' churchgoing were meant to give people a better understanding of his little-known nominee.

"People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers," he said. "They want to know Harriet Miers' background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. Part of Harriet Miers' life is her religion."

That comment further inflamed critics of the nomination who contend Miers' religion is being used to sell the nominee to the right flank of Bush's conservative base. They argue that the president is asking them to trust him and blindly support his nomination even though Miers has no judicial record that would offer insight into how she would vote on the high court.

(AP) Harriet Miers, President Bush's Supreme Court nominee, left, is greeted on the steps of the Senate... Full Image

On a radio show broadcast Wednesday, James Dobson, founder of the conservative Focus on the Family, said that before Miers was nominated, deputy White House chief of staff Karl Rove reassured him that she was an "evangelical Christian, that she is from a very conservative church, which is almost universally pro-life."

Religion was an area the White House carefully avoided in pushing the chief justice nomination of John Roberts just a month ago. During his confirmation hearings, Roberts sought to assure senators that his rulings would be guided by his understanding of the facts of cases, the law and the Constitution, not by his personal views. "My faith and my religious beliefs do not play a role," said Roberts, who is Catholic.

Now, isn't this interesting? Roberts' Catholic Faith plays no roll in his nomination to SCOTUS, but Ms. Miers' Evangelicalism does? Excuse me for flinching at the obvious double-standard at work here. This is just one more unintended problem the President's nomination has caused. The fragile coalition between Catholics and Evangelicals may suffer enormous strain once both sides come to terms with the sudden change-in-tone from the White House. Imagine how offended I could be if I actually placed more stock in this apparent double-speak. Now, imagine those Conservative Catholics that already have.

And it's all for naught. The Religion card is a sucker's bet. It reakes of deficating on Article VII of the Constitution. It won't assuage irrate conservatives. It will give more fodder to the President's Reasonable, mouth-foaming opponents from the far left:

"The White House and the religious right leaders rallying around the beleaguered nomination of Harriet Miers continue to cite her religious beliefs and the church she attends as reasons to believe she will oppose abortion rights and to bolster support for her among activists on the far right," said Ralph Neas, director of the liberal People for the American Way. "What's wrong for John Roberts can't be right for Harriet Miers."

The Rev. Barry Lynn, director of Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, said anyone who tried to bring up the topic of religion during the Roberts confirmation was labeled a bigot. "Now Bush and Rove are touting where Miers goes to church and using that as a selling point," Lynn said. "The hypocrisy is staggering."

This will only be the beginning. Professor Bainbridge has more on the perils of playing the religion card, including possible offense to both Evangelicals and Catholics:

First, I think John Miller has a valid question:

Why aren’t evangelicals more concerned about the fact that Harriet Miers ran the Texas lottery? Memo to HH: Of course I recognize that evangelicals make up a diverse group with varied opinions on the merits and morals of gambling. But a large number of them also oppose it passionately. Earlier this year, Jim Dobson, Chuck Colson, and more than 200 other religious leaders signed an open letter that called gambling a “menace to our national welfare." Well, what’s the Texas lottery if not state-sponsored gambling?

Second, Miers' proponents need to be very careful in how they play the faith card so as to avoid offending Catholics. As I observed a while back:

There is still an element in the evangelical community that firm believes Catholics are not Christians. (Jack Chick is just the worst of the lot.) The promising theological and political rapprochement between some evangelicals and some Catholics is still quite tenuous. If the people playing the faith card to get Miers confirmed aren't careful, they could do grave damage to the Evangelicals and Catholics Together project and even the Republican coalition. It was, after all, us weekly Mass attending Catholics who elected George Bush in 2004.

If the President can verify Ms. Miers bona fides with actual evidence, let him do so. "Trust me" and identity-politic games will convince no one. If he can't put up, it's time for him to shut up. Either he should offer evidence to support his contention that she's the kind of justice the nation needs, or else he should withdraw her nomination.

May someone in his administration muster up the courage and prudence to deliver this message to him soon.