Using Her Religion

Opinion Times considers the White Houses current "Trust me, she's an Evangelical" rhetoric.

He finds it wanting:

At all costs, the nomination should stand or fall on Miers’ ability to adjudicate cases coming to SCOTUS. While I find it comforting that Miers looks at law from a biblical perspective, this fact and her experience as a lawyer do not constitute judicial acumen.

In addition, he offers the Captain's wise perspective (which I added some more):

When members of the Democratic caucus used religion, disguising it as they did, to filibuster people like John Roberts and Janice Rogers Brown for their staunch Catholocism, everyone knew it -- and we Republicans rightly called them out for conducting religious tests for office. Well, religious tests work both ways. One cannot eat their cake and have it too on questions of faith as prerequisites for office. Either it's off limits and no one uses religious affiliations to deny or promote candidates, or we start having open wars over the nature and truth of religion on every candidate sent for Senatorial confirmation.

Do we really want to use Congress for this kind of debate? No; it will take an already divisive process and start the kind of debilitating social stress that the Founders wanted to avoid in Article VI, Clause 3 of the Constitution. Congress does not exist to pursue the True Religion or the Meaning of Creation; it exists to provide rules of law that the Executive enforces and that the Judiciary considers when ruling on cases brought before it.

They're exactly right. I supported Chief Justice Robert's nomination because his judicial acumen would empower him to implement sound jurisprudence routed in Natural Law. Ms. Miers does not possess such capacity, at least from the record so far. The White House's effort to play the Evangelical tribe's card to promote her legitimacy opens the floodgates to destructive entanglement between the Federal Government and Religion. The Founding Fathers sought to avoid these kinds of conflicts when they prohibited religious tests in Article VI of the US constitution.

This just shows how bankrupt Ms. Miers candidacy for the High Court truly is. The Administration can't come up with anything more convincing than political tribalism. The President should stop the bleeding of his self-inflicted wound and withdraw her nomination.

Update: Professor Bainbridge also has problems with the White House using her religion.