The Pendragon's Hall

There is nothing that shows more the decadence of the legal system than the new process of confirming Supreme Court justices. The Senate of course has always had to confirm them but they never used to campaign for office like a regular politician. Harriet Miers, like John Roberts before her, is now visiting senators on Capitol Hill to raise support for her upcoming confirmation hearings. The problem with this is that it makes judges like the senators themselves...you know how they do, try to convince conservatives they're for family values, and then try to convince Leftists they're really not all that conservative. Whatever happened to judges being impartial interpreters of the law? Now they scrabble in it like everyone else. How can we expect Harriet Miers to judge according to law and not politics if she can't even remain above politics during her hearings? The "conservative pundits" that the Sacramento Bee cites are correct: Harriet Miers should be preparing to distinguish herself at her confirmation hearings, not cajoling senators ahead of time. This is, in the end, the real problem I have with Miers, even if she turns out to be a staunchly pro-life conservative justice, is that it is not her job to go politicking and to vote on major policy initiatives. She has to decide the law. If she can prove that she has a conservative grounding in the rule of law and the supremacy of the Constitution, then I'll back her to the hilt. But if she doesn't have that backing, I don't care if she would vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, because that only gets rid of one symptom--legalized abortion. The main problem, that of judicial activism, would still remain. We need to get at the root of that before worrying about all the branches.