Gender doesn't make up for experience

[amul]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4304684.stm

That's right, he's picked another aid for a high-level position they're totally unqualified for. She's never been a judge, fer crying out loud.

My personal favorite line from the article: "But some of Mr Bush's supporters have expressed concern at her lack of conservative credentials....[much further down]...'The president's nomination of Miers is a betrayal of the conservative, pro-family voters,' said the conservative advocacy group Public Advocate." That's right, folks. They're worried about her conservative credentials. Never mind that she has NO credentials, but see, if she's never judged anything, than how can we know if she's interested in shoving the Moral Majority's agenda into everyone's bedrooms?

Oh, I'm sorry. She's a middle-ground choice because she's a woman, so hopefully Democrats will overlook her complete lack of experience as a Constitutional scholar. Because we'd much rather see an incompetent female lawyer than an actual MODERATE WITHOUT A RELIGIOUS AGENDA, which is what we were asking for in the first place.

Hell in a hand basket, I say!

Exactly how many crap choices is he going to offer before we all just throw up our hands and say, "Next!"

Comments

[hny2k.livejournal.com]

And whose interpretation of what the Consitution says are we supposed to use? How are we supposed to apply directives concerning such broad topics as "Life, Liberty and Happiness" to a global marketplace that destroys the invidiuals sense of freedom from encroachment?

Well we're not, since that phrase isn't in the Constitution, but the Declaration of Independence. :-)

(And is actually "the pursuit of happiness", a not uninmportant distinction, but I digress).

[themoocow.livejournal.com]

Eh.... his point still stands I think. The preamble to the Constitution is really nice sounding, but what the heck does it /mean/? Granted, it isn't part of the legal document, but still, it's arguable that it should effect how we consider the meaning of the rest of the document.

[hny2k.livejournal.com]

You are correct in that, though I wasn't just being snarky. I was going to add a post that there was an important point buried in there, which I guess I'll use now to do.

Roughly put, we have to understand what the purpose of the documents is in order for us to raise questions about how they are interpreted. For example, the Declaration of Independence, where you find the phrase "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness" is not the same as the Constitution and its included Preamble. Each has their own purpose, and in fact, the Declaration and Constitution were each written by two almost entirely different groups of men. They can't all be considered as one jumbled unit, but uniquely.

Your reference of the Preamble, though, raises a good example of why I mention this. In it you find the phrase "promote the general welfare". This has been seized upon as justification for anything the federal goverment does that fits under that description whether or not there is any mention of this power anywhere else. However, the point of the Preamble was simply to explain why the Constitution was being written, not what the powers delineated to the new government were. That was what the rest of the document was for. Madison himself said some years later that if he knew that this phrase would be used as an excuse to nullify the rest of the Constitution he would have never included it in there.

So I do agree with you that how a judge interprets what the Constitution allows the federal government to do is very important. However, what also must go hand-in-hand with that is an understanding on our end of what we should be expecting of them. That requires us to know what these documents are, what they say, and what their purposes is. Without that, nothing else really follows.