President Bush will probably recover from the debacle that was
the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination, but the episode
unfortunately left a stain upon his one constituency that as a
group largely supported her: evangelical Christians.
By no means were they unified behind Miers — Concerned Women
for America and the legal group Liberty Counsel were exceptions —
but almost all her recognizable backers were evangelicals. They
included Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Prison Fellowship
Ministry’s Chuck Colson, radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt, and
former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
Why the “stain”? In a February 1993 Washington Post
article reporter Michael Weiskopf described varying strains of
evangelical Christians as “poor, uneducated and easy to command” —
a lazy characterization that the Post later said it
regretted. But it illustrated in many ways a wide perception that
most evangelicals are intellectual lightweights, which in recent
years began to get demythologized by sharp minds like Hewitt,
Colson, and World magazine’s Marvin Olasky.
Christian support for the Miers nomination, however, was a
setback for that reputation reversal. Upon President Bush’s
announcement of her as his choice, Dobson was among the first to
embrace Karl Rove’s “take my word for it” justification, because he
said Miers aligned with evangelicals’ views against abortion. Jay
Sekulow, who leads the American Center for Law and Justice,
endorsed Miers as a legal mind in the “conservative mainstream” who
is “an excellent choice with an extraordinary record of service in
the legal community and is certain to approach her work on the high
court with a firm commitment to follow the Constitution and the
rule of law.”
Glittering but empty reviews and meaningless endorsements aside,
Miers presented a barge-load of doubts for her many conservative
skeptics, who begged repeatedly for her supporters to show evidence
of her legal philosophical heft. They got none.
Instead her evangelical backers disengaged their minds in feeble
attempts to justify her nomination. As the doubters cited several
possible candidates whose significant jurisprudential backgrounds
were demonstrable, the Christians emphasized Miers’s humility and
servant’s heart at her church. When critics begged for her
advocates to show them just one — one — attribute that
showed Miers was qualified for the Court, they quietly assured
everybody that she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Perhaps most disappointingly, Hewitt — an influential blogger
whose star as an evangelical thinker has enjoyed a (well-earned)
meteoric rise — turned the whole Miers defense into what amounted
to a “stop picking on the poor lady” campaign. He even went so far
as to identify his side the “anti-anti-Miers” caucus; a turnabout
against her critics instead of what should have been an effective
advocacy effort for her. That’s what happens when your
candidate’s record on constitutional analysis is thinner than
phyllo.
With the absence of firepower on behalf of their nominee, the
counteroffensive against Miers’s critics was vigorous. Her
evangelical defenders were particularly incensed at comments made
by the Washington Post’s George Will, whose Oct. 23 column
alleged that Miers’s defenders were degrading themselves, in part
because they cited her piety as a good reason to support her.
“The crude people who crudely invoked (her piety) probably were
sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently
believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an
anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an
unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision
itself,” Will wrote.
Sure, the Post’s best wordsmith took an obvious shot at
Miers’s Christian defenders, but their blind faith in hope of a
simplistic Roe reversal made them a plump target. As Will
argued, her supporters failed to understand that an ability to make
a constitutional argument to reach that result is as important, if
not more important, than the result itself. To raise your hand and
vote “aye” or “nay” is insufficient. They abandoned their Berean
scrupulousness when it came to the political issue most important
to them, because they wanted to take a shortcut.
The result was ugly, with frustrated evangelicals claiming that
Miers at least deserved a Senate hearing and an up-or-down vote.
They suggested that the uproarious objections from her opponents
derailed the traditional process that a president’s nominees should
be heard.
But there is no such entitlement. The business of politics is
all about applying pressure with the resources you have (like money
or punditry) in order to effect the change you want. Court
candidates aren’t the only kind of political dropouts when they see
hopeless prospects.
This time the bullhorns of most conservatives easily overwhelmed
the evangelicals’ squawky Mr. Microphones. The fallout is that
those Christians are, at least for now, perceived publicly as
one-noters with little depth — even among their other conservative
friends.
Here’s hoping that they regain their “A” game in time for the
president’s second chance. I think we’re going to need them.
