10-20-05, 9:28 am
The relative ease with which John Roberts was nominated was a significant defeat for working class and progressive forces in the US and a major victory for the Bush administration. I say working class specifically, because some Democrats like Patrick Leahy, a liberal Democrat in terms of his record, turned tail and supported Roberts--entranced by his establishment credentials as a big money Washington corporate government lawyer. For the organization men of both parties, Roberts was someone to look up to, regardless of his clear right-wing record.
Now Bush seeks to complete his 'doubleplay' by nominating a right-wing Republican woman, Harriet Miers, who has been a loyal cog in the Texas right Republican political machine that he took over when he was elected governor in 1994. Miers, like Roberts, is a strong supporter of presidential power and someone whose commitment to sustaining constitutional civil rights and civil liberties protections is, based on the known record, non-existent. Miers like Roberts is a corporate lawyer, but not one with either the legal credentials or the class clout. She is also a woman whom senior leaders of the ultra-right, including far-right ideologue Paul Weyrich, don’t trust on the abortion issue. In terms of reason and logic, this makes no sense of any kind. Miers is a former Catholic who became a right-wing evangelical Protestant. As head of the Texas chapter of the American Bar Association, she participated in a maneuver to have ABA lawyers through the country vote by secret ballot on the Association’s endorsement of Roe v. Wade, an act whose only purpose was to undermine, if not reverse the endorsement. In response to a questionnaire from a reproductive rights group she political support she was seeking, Miers endorsed a constitutional 'Right to Life Amendment,' which the ultra-right has been championing for many years. The chances of her defending Roe v. Wade, given the record, are about as good as Donald Rumsfeld supporting a $100 billion dollar reduction in the military budget.
Yet the attacks continue. Some believe (and this was my original thought) that the Bush administration is engaged in a political sting – creating a phony 'conservative' opposition to a rightwing conservative candidate in order to deflect serious Center-Left opposition and in effect permit the Democratic Senate minority to accept the nomination. But something else may be involved.
We may be dealing with reactionaries who see any woman as untrustworthy when it comes to pregnancy terminations. For such reactionaries it is men who have the right to control women’s bodies and what they do with those bodies as completely as owners and investors have the right to control labor.
Although Baer has been a poster boy for corporate arrogance and hypocrisy since the early twentieth century, his words could be easily turned around to say that 'the rights and interests of pregnant women will be protected and cared for, not by feminist agitators, but by the Christian men and their women to Whom God in His infinite wisdom has given control of the reproductive power of the country…' by the Bush administration and their henchmen. For the right, biology is still destiny.
Trusting any women to sit on the Supreme Court when reproductive rights was the issue might be as dangerous as permitting a worker, no matter who conservative he was, to head the NLRB. Besides, there is one woman on the court already and for the right a token one is more than enough.
In the society generally, the Right actively opposes affirmative action policies and encourages the replacement of minority and female professionals in the arts sciences, sciences, professions, and managerial positions with 'qualified White males now that the cohort who entered these positions in the 1970s begins to retire. It might be difficult to find any woman whom the Right would support for the Court.
This is by no means any endorsement of Miers, who will join Scalia Thomas, and Roberts if she reaches the Court as a rightwing 'gang of four.' What I am saying is that the Left and Center-Left must actively oppose Harriet Miers because she is a reactionary Republican, not because she is a woman and not sit by and watch as the Bush administration finds itself entangled with its own supporters on the issue. The Left and Center-Left should also argue that this flap over the Miers nomination is further evidence of how the Bush administration has both unleashed and given credibility to an extreme Right that seeks literally to obliterate the civil rights and civil liberties that minorities and women won through the 20th century.
--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs and may be reached at pa-letters@politicalaffairs.net.
