Here's a followup piece to the "Intexification" post I put up last week. It's an excerpt from a Lee Drutman post at TomPaine:
For those trying to make sense of President Bush’s decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the supreme Court, here’s a question: What do Miers and John Roberts have in common, besides the fact that they were both nominated to the Supreme Court?
Answer: Both had substantial careers as corporate lawyers before being nominated. . . .
Miers, meanwhile “has a blue-chip résumé that would wow Wall Street,” as Business Week correspondent Lorraine Woellert put it in Sunday’s Washington Post . Miers was a managing partner of the Dallas law firm Locke Liddell & Sapp, where she handled consumer class-action lawsuits for Microsoft Corp., the Texas Automobile Dealers Association, and former mortgage industry giant Lomas & Nettleton. She has also defended Dupont, Disney and Miramax, among others. Additionally, Miers has served as a board member of Dallas' Better Business Bureau and the Greater Dallas Chamber of Commerce.
Such legal service to large corporations is not typically part of the resume of a Supreme Court Justice. As Bruce Josten, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s top lobbyist, told the Christian Science Monitor , “Having two justices, [Chief Justice John] Roberts and Miers, who we expect to join him shortly, that's adding two to nothing from the point of view of that kind of experience. That's big for the business community.”. . .
Unfortunately, this angle has been largely lost in the public debate over Miers. Instead, the media has focused on the infighting among conservatives about her credentials.
Indeed, it is newsworthy that many of the president’s hard-core social conservative supporters say they feel betrayed. They want to know: Where is the strict constructionist they were promised, the justice who would heroically restore America back to a shining theocracy on a hill, safe from the liberal scourges of pornography, homosexuality and abortion? ...
Yet, one lesson we should have learned from the Bush presidency by now is that while social and intellectual conservatives are nice to have on your side, it is the large corporations that write the checks. And if you can throw a bone to those other groups now and then (like, say, coming out for a gay marriage amendment that has no chance of passage, or giving elegant speeches about your Christian faith), you can keep them in line.
But if you look closely at Bush’s record, you’ll see plenty of words about family values and religion and the virtues of small government, but plenty of actions on behalf of things like tort reform and bankruptcy reform.
This is the GOP m.o., folks. When push comes to shove it's all about the money, and what money wants, money gets. Thomas Frank nailed it in What's the Matter with Kansas. Most red staters aren't crazy, religious fanatics. They are sincerely concerned about the moral climate of the culture, and when given the choice they align with people who speak in a traditional-values vocabulary. I understand that, but what I don't understand is their credulity. I thought we were smarter than that.
With the Miers nomination some red staters are finally catching on that they've been conned. Dobson's a little slow to grasp the situation, but what do you expect? Karl told him what he wanted to hear, and Dobson, the tribal leader with the ear of the great white chief in Washington is credulous enough to believe him.
Should that mean that liberals should rejoice that their abortion rights are probably safe? Maybe, but they're being conned as well. Money doesn't care one way or another about abortion. The abortion issue is a red herring. Something to get liberals and conservative all riled up about in the front yard, while in the back yard they've got their truck backed up to the door and are stealing everything they can carry.
It's remarkable to me that hardly any one is focussing on the concentration of wealth and power theme. That's at the heart of the Bush agenda, everything else is posturing.