Constitution and Courts

As soon as I landed in Memphis this morning on my way to Searcy, the news came in via emaila and voice mails. Miers withdraws.

This is less a victory for conservatives than a narrowly averted disaster. We are relieved and joyful, as we should be.

What next?

Not gloating. Not arguing about the veracity of […]

Conservatives start to fight and futures markets on Miers (Both Tradesports and Newsfutures) decline.

Well, folks are talking, “hypothetically” of course, about how to pull the Miers nomination. As I write, rumors of a withdrawal don’t seem to be reflected in the market at Newsfutures, which puts her chances at 48%. This is higher than it was earlier last week. For a different measure, check […]

I need to add another book to my must read list. This one was suggested by James Wiser and prompted by a discussion about originalism on this post at his site.

It’s Interpreting the Bible and the Constitution by Jaroslav Pelikan. There are no customer reviews, but the editorial review at Amazon says:

[…]

According Newsfutures (a predictive market), Harriet Miers’ chances of becoming Justice Miers in 2005 have fallen in recent days to 29%. So, maybe there is hope after all. Maybe our system is allowing the wisdom of the crowd to overtake the groupthink.

As John Fund describes it today in the Wall Street Journal, the Harriet Miers nomination looks like a classic illustration of the problems with groupthink.

James Surowiecki describes how and why small, homogeneous groups like the President and his closest advisers can make bad decisions when they lack “cognitive diversity,” presume consensus, rely too heavily on […]

My reaction to the Miers nomination appears to be progressing through the five stages of grief. First, there was denial quickly followed by anger. Has Bush lost his mind? Is he really back on the sauce? She was the Staff Secretary. She served on the city counsel and […]

The Roberts hearings began yesterday. It started at noon and took all day just to get through the opening statements. I was puzzled by this section of Sen. Feinstein’s statement on the separation of church and state (only a part of which she had time to read aloud):

I recently traveled to Europe where […]

Someone alerted me an AP article on the .xxx controversy. It has some more details on the arguments that conservatives are making against it:

Skeptics argue, however, that porn sites are likely to keep their existing “.com” storefronts, even as they set up shop in the new “.xxx” domain name. And that will reduce […]

So the Washington Post and the rest of this town are all in a tizzy because twenty years ago Supreme Court nominee John Roberts dared to suggest that homemaker might be a more noble profession than attorney:

His remark on whether homemakers should become lawyers came in 1985 in reply to a suggestion from […]