When is the Right not the Right?

I'm on the right on most issues.

Gun control, tax-and-spend, amnesty for illegal aliens and affirmative action are all phrases that will get you sent to the bathroom at this house with a bar of soap and a brush. "And don't come out until you've washed the stench of those words from your mouth!"

I'm not of the Religious Right, however. I don't line up with any ideologues and have trouble identifying myself as a member of any group larger than my immediate family. I'm a pragmatic, pro-choice, Bible-out-of-the-government guy who is also a strong advocate of traditional marriage and abstinence. I don't want people to tell me what to do, outside of the minimal framework needed for societal interaction, and have no interest in telling others what to do.

I believe in hiring the best people for the job - lay the resume's out in a color-blind, gender-blind, connections-blind manner and pick the best one.

That's why President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers to be a Supreme Court Justice makes me very nervous and makes me question my decision to support a Republican agenda. It shows a collossal lack or respect for the office to which he's been elected and hints at an ego which places the man above the office and politics above the good of the country.

Miers' nomination miserably fails the pragmatic criteria in choosing the best candidate for the job. She's not in the major leagues of jurisprudence; she's a friend of Bush's who was chosen for her close ties and to fill the seat offered by outgoing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor with another female. I think Bush has nominated the best judicial candidate for him, not for the country as a whole. He has betrayed the trust of the voters who chose him to lead this hugely diverse country in the best manner possible, not tailor it to his own liking. He owed it to the country to nominate the best...he showed himself to be a very small man in a large office by nominating his toady.

The nomination fiasco is all the more glaring, coming as it does on the heels of the confirmation of John Roberts as Chief Justice. Roberts, a widely-acknowledged legal all-star, is the mold Bush should have been seeking to fill. Instead, he has used spin and personal anecdote to make the case for a second- or third-tier candidate. "Trust me" on Miers will become Bush II's "Read My Lips."

I DON'T want reassurances from "confidential sources" that Miers is an evangelical Christian who will **wink, wink** overturn Roe V Wade. I have no interest in that being overturned. I DO have interest in U.S. Supreme Court Justices deciding cases based on a strict interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and not through interpretation of international law. I have an interest in a court which will limit the growth of government control and will strike down outrageous governmental injustices like the Kelo eminent domain case and the countless others cropping up like wildfires in its wake.

I want someone with the resume' of a towering legal mind sitting on the U.S. Supreme Court, anything less is a slap in the face of the American people by a man who puts himself above the welfare of the country.