Law

Beldar blog has an excellent post about the appointment of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. I was thinking of writing something similar, and he beat me too it, and did it better. Bottom line: The lady is very qualified for the job, and the fact that she is not from the academic world and not already a judge is a plus. We already have a lot of that type of knowledge and background. It is all to the good that we will now have someone on the Court who has had to work real lawyer’s hours, for paying clients, and make arguments to real courts and be accountable for the results, as well as running a major law firm and getting the bills paid. The kinds of considerations she will bring to the Court, as Beldar notes, will be a source of “diversity” far more valuable than the happenstance of her gender.

Also, a multi-level piece of hearsay has reached me from a person who knows a person, etc. who has worked with this lady. I offer this with all possible disclaimers. But the word is she is very, very smart and very conservative, judicially and otherwise. In other words, not another Souter. I sure hope so. And I hope she gets in.

I’ll note that this is tactically a very clever move by Team Bush. The Democrats have done years of opposition research on every possible “likely” Bush appointee and they would have been ready to launch a massive attack from the get-go. This way they are scrambling to find things to use to attack the nominee, and that means they will be less able to destroy her nomination and damage the President, since they will have less time to prepare. This appointment process is a zero-sum political struggle, and both sides are out to deal each other a major, damaging defeat. That is what this is about, despite the increasingly flimsy pretense that this about selecting someone who is “objectively” qualified. The Supreme Court has become a super-legislature, every one knows that, and the stakes are extremely high. Bush is playing to win, and he doesn’t mind winning ugly.

Update: Jim Miller weighs in with more detail about Miers, which makes me think even more that the pick is a good one. Like him, I think it is a plus that the selection of Miers “annoys law professors”. Like him, I like “boring judges who write boring opinions”. I do not want an “interesting” judge who is going to “find” European-style positive welfare rights in the Constitution, to pick just one bad idea which is afloat these days. Like him, I think this is a politically-motivated selection, and that is OK because the Supreme Court makes decisions which have huge political consequences, and the idea of some apolitical competence is a mirage.

Also, see Dave Kopel on some good, strong words from Miers on the right to keep and bear arms. Yeah, baby. (Via Instapundit.)

Update II: Patrick Ruffini has even more good things to say about soon-to-be-Justice Miers.

The [argument over firearms confiscations in New Orleans] certainly illustrates the extent to which the legal community has gotten into the habit of resorting to the most amazing sophistries, in order to avoid recognizing when certain civil liberties are being violated. I think you’ve been doing it so long you don’t even recognize anymore that they’re nothing but sophistries.

–Brett Bellmore

The big news amongst civil libertarians (and Libertarians in general) is the order issued by the Mayor to forcibly evacuate New Orleans.

The reasons why the authorities want people to leave are commendable. The sewage system has broken down, and the water choking the streets is little cleaner than what you’d find in a clogged honkytonk toilet on Saturday morning. There is a very real possibility of various plagues breaking out, cholera being the chief suspect. This could stretch relief efforts to the breaking point, as medical supplies and facilities simply aren’t adequate to handle such a disaster.

The methods being used are somewhat less noble. Police are going from door to door, heavily armed and always in a sizable group, ordering residents out of their homes. I can’t find any reliable reports that force has been used yet, but that will probably change by tomorrow. (The live webcams available through this blog show the police staging area for the effort.)

So far these heavy-handed tactics have worked, as individuals are rather loathe to tell the 5 or 6 guys crowding into their living room while toting assault rifles to get bent. But eventually there’s going to be someone who’s going to do exactly that, and then there will be what is referred to as “an incident”.

The Mayor may have spoken, but not everyone is very comfortable with it. The military say they won’t take part in forcibly removing anyone from New Orleans, the LA National Guard said that they don’t take orders from the Mayor, and the police are very leery about the whole thing.

It’s possible that, if everyone isn’t very careful, a homeowner could take a potshot at the police trying to get him out of his house. Then what?

In an effort to reduce the chances of this looming news story, the Mayor has also decreed that all privately owned firearms are to be confiscated. (The place to go for the skinny is Publicola, who has the lowdown and the links.)

My take on all this is that the Mayor is probably right to order the police to get as many people out of the city as possible, but he’s wrong to order a forcible evacuation. He’s also crashingly, loudly, agonizingly wrong to order the police to confiscate legally owned private property.

Eugene has an interesting post about the legalities of the order, and he points out that private security guards are allowed to openly carry military weapons without fear of police. This comment by Robert Lyman outlines a dilemma for those who are on the Left side of the political fence.

It looks like the Mayor is creating a huge problem for both himself and his administration, something that only makes sense if he is either a drooling incompetent or that he has come to the conclusion that his political career is doomed anyway. As far as this goes, though, I’m more interested in the legal and political fallout to come in the years ahead.

And I hope that no one pulls a trigger, although the Mayor’s posturing has certainly increased the chances of something like that happening.

(5) I was both amused and angered by Justice Stevens’s paean to the democratic process as the appropriate avenue of relief for advocates of medical marijuana at the end of his opinion. Every Justice who joined Stevens’s opinion voted to prohibit states from regulating homosexual sex in Lawrence and [if they were on the Court at the time] voted to limit the government’s power to regulate abortion in Casey. Why was the democratic process not the appropriate avenue of relief for the victims of overzealous government regulation in those cases? It seems we do to some extent live under a system where the personal preferences of the Justices, having nothing to do with the history, text, or logic of the Constitution, dictate when the Supreme Court will or will not intervene to overturn particular regulations.

-David Bernstein, commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision in Ashcroft v. Raich.

B in B is a soldier’s blog from Iraq, which is well done with good photos. (Hat tip, Newt Gingrich’s blog.)

A recent post entitled Courage recounts two Iraqi women, obviously terrified, who nonetheless, at great risk, provided the Americans with valuable information.

The younger woman began to speak frantically in Arabic, her hands trembling with nervousness. …We removed our Kevlar helmets and eye protection, a gesture of trust, and did our best to figure out what she was trying to tell us. …whatever she had to tell us was substantial, substantial enough to get her killed for telling us. …The information the women gave us was colossal. It was detailed, in-depth first hand intelligence we were able to verify through her specific and calculated accounts of recent events. I wish I could go into it. …

Our soldier-blogger reflects on the courage of the woman who gave them this information

The risk she is subjecting herself to is a brutal and miserable death. Her entire life has consisted of totalitarianism, fear, death and brutality. Without ever having experienced the pleasures of freedom, without a tangible example of common decency… a guage to base right and wrong on, she has somehow managed to overcome her incomprehensible fears and pressures and do what is right. She grew up under Saddam Hussein who brainwashed and manipulated these people. He controlled all aspects of their life. For the past few years she has experienced terrorism and war, hell all around her. For her to have the intestinal fortitude to come forward just amazes me. One thing is for sure; the ability to know what is right and the courage to act on it is instilled somewhere in us all. I know that I will never forget this woman and the example she set for me. For the rest of my life, when I think I have it rough or am put in a situation where doing the right thing seems difficult, I’ll think back to yesterday afternoon and the humble Iraqi woman who showed me what courage was first hand.

He goes on to say:

While writing the last paragraph I was just notified by my team leader that one of the locations the woman gave us was searched by another element of our Company. They found tunnels buried in a field that were full of 155mm artillery rounds (used in road side bombs), rocket propelled grenades, rocket launchers, mortars and numerous other weapons and explosives. That find right there just saved a lot of lives.

RTWT.

As previously noted, “the only real indicator of progress in a war of counterinsurgency [is] the volume of intelligence spontaneously offered by the population … .” This story puts a human face on these cold words. The courage of individual Iraqis is absolutely necessary to defeat the insurgency and bring peace and order to the country.