Harriet Miers: A Sucker Punch

George Bush thinks everyone’s a sucker -- left, right and center -- and with his Supreme Court nominations, he’s proving it.

Imagine nominating a sycophantic nobody just when your poll numbers have given the mainstream media a by-your-leave to turn on the heat for your cronyism and machine politics. Imagine nominating a sycophantic nobody with a record thin and ambiguous enough to piss off suspicious activists of all stripes.

And imagine being smug in your knowledge that you'll get away with it. Bush's fellow Republicans will grumble -- the National Review will editorialize about how little regard you've shown towards those high-quality conservatives they've been cultivating at the Federalist Society and George Will might kvetch in the Washington Post, but at the end of the day they will buckle under and follow their Fearless Leader.

Harriet Miers -- and probably John Roberts, too -- will make suckers out of all of us by respecting the precedent (superprecedent!) of Roe v. Wade. Meaning the joke will be on ... everyone!

That's because the dirty secret is that the last thing the Republican leadership wants to do is overturn Roe. It would mark the beginning of the end for them and they know it.

Where would the GOP be without the specter of godless, baby-killing liberals keeping its base awake at night? Gone would be the their most potent organizing issue, the source of their passion advantage. Gone too would be the apathy of those on the left and center-left -- poof! It would be the end of their suburban "security moms." Young women would begin to realize that maybe, just maybe, thinking of oneself as a feminist isn't the worst thing in the world.

That wouldn't be good for the Conservative Revolution. Take it from anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, a master of the "fusionist" blend of social and economic conservatism. He told Reason Magazine:

My fear is that if [the religious right] get their main issues settled, they'll go home. The Christian Coalition represents a lot of white Southerners who used to be quasi-socialists. They used to buy into the whole Democratic Party's class warfare arguments. With a lot of those constituencies, we've brought them along so that they're as good on the tax issue as anyone else."

Would Karl Rove let those formerly quasi-socialist Christian Coalition white southerners just get their way and go home? Aren't we on the left supposed to live in hushed awe of his evil, Machiavellian genius? Or are we to imagine that Rove and the rest of the GOP's top strategists care more about fetuses than winning elections?

The question then becomes: why would they overturn Roe? I asked People For the American Way's Ralph Neas that question some time ago, and he argued that the right takes a long view of its goals, and would tolerate some electoral damage in the short- and medium-term in order to stack the court with conservative judicial activists for a generation to come.

But the administration can have their cake and eat it too by picking the right conservatives. Conservatism means little when it comes to judicial philosophies -- the right comes in different stripes. As the Washington Post put it, business has been "pushing its own brand of justice," one that doesn't always jibe with the goals of the right-wing Jesus set:

Business has tended to seek an expansive interpretation of the law and Constitution to impose national, as opposed to state, standards on a number of regulatory and liability matters. Conversely, religious conservatives have sought to diminish or eliminate the federal role, especially in the case of the key 1973 abortion decision, Roe v. Wade.

What's more, social conservatives are doing a bang-up job of restricting reproductive rights with Roe in place, toiling away under the radar. According to the National Abortion Rights Action League, 714 anti-abortion measures were considered by state legislatures in 2004, almost a third more than in 2003. Eighty-seven percent of American counties have no abortion providers. Why stir up a debate when you're doing just fine restricting choice on the QT?