Mark Steyn searches desperately for that pony that's bound to be in there

By Aussiegirl

We've all been waiting for Mark Steyn to tell us what he thinks of the Miers nomination. Not much, as it turns out -- but he guesses she'll be OK. Which pretty much sums up this nomination. However, he is clutching at straws when he states that Miers is a strong supporter of the right to bear arms simply because she is said to possess a Smith and Wesson .45. It's been reported that the weapon was pressed on her by her good friend Hecht, who felt she needed it. It has reportedly been lying tucked into a bottom drawer somewhere in her home ever since. How have we come to this pass when the great Mark Steyn is reduced to reading so much into such a trivial and even misapprehended detail of her personal life in order to glean even an inkling of her constitutional outlook. He also cites her personal opposition to abortion. Need it be pointed out that Roe v. Wade is about more than simply being personally opposed or in favor of abortion, but involves "penumbras and emanations" that were read into the Constitution by a results-oriented court? Even the great Mark Steyn is reduced to saying "...she seems likely to vote the right way for whatever reasons." Whatever.

But what he does say, which is of great importance, is tantamount to praising with faint damn. He has rightly intuited that Bush is Tony Blair and Clinton, but with a ranch. The REAL Third Way candidate who, in Steyn's words is "... a religio-cultural conservative who believes in big government and big spending and paternalistic federal intervention in areas where few conservatives have ever previously thought it wise.

She's not ideal, but she'll get job done

Conservative commentators have been withering about the inner-circle cronyism of the Miers pick. Where do I stand? To be honest, I haven't a clue. A vacancy comes up on the Supreme Court, and for a month or so every columnist is expected to be an expert on the jurisprudence of a couple of dozen legal types he'd never previously heard of. For what it's worth, my sense is that Harriet Miers will be, case by case, a more reliable vote against leftist judicial activism than her mercurial predecessor, Sandra Day O'Connor. Why do I say this? Well, she's a strong supporter of the right to bear arms. The great Second Amendment expert Dave Kopel says you have to go back to Louis Brandeis 90 years ago to find a Supreme Court justice whose pre-nomination writings extol gun rights as fulsomely as Miers. According to an old boyfriend, Judge Nathan Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court, she packs heat -- a Smith & Wesson .45 -- which I can say with certainty the other lady justice, the far-left Ruth Bader Ginsburg, never has. She also's personally very opposed to abortion.

In other words, what seems to be emerging is a woman Bush responds to as a fellow cultural conservative and evangelical conservative (she's a born-again Christian), rather than as a judicial conservative -- a label Judge Bork dislikes, preferring quite correctly that we distinguish judges not as conservative or liberal but as either originalists or judicial activists. I find it hard to discuss Miers seriously in those terms, but on balance she seems likely to vote the right way for whatever reasons. She's thus another representative of Bush and Karl Rove's belief in incrementalism: that the Republican majority can be made a permanent feature of the landscape if you build it one small brick at a time. Miers is, at best, such a brick, at a time when conservatives were hoping Bush would drop a huge granite block on the court. But, given that she started out as a Democrat and has been on the receiving end of the partisan attacks on the administration for five years, she seems less likely than any detached effete legal scholar to be prone to the remorseless drift to the left that happens to Republican Supreme Court nominees.

True, that's little more than a hunch on my part. In the meantime, what's left is the base's distress and the perception of weakness on the president's part. The first is real and may cause problems in 2006, though I can't see it costing the GOP its congressional majorities. As for Bush personally, he was the better of the alternatives in both 2000 and 2004, but come on, the "compassionate conservative" thing was, in its implications, far more insulting to the base than the steel tariffs or the proposed illegal immigrant amnesty or the judicial nominees. Bush, it seems ever more obvious, is the Third Wayer Clinton only pretended to be.

The Slicker reckoned that, to be electable, a Democrat had to genuflect rhetorically to some kind of sensible soccer-mom-ish center, and he was right, at least insofar as without him the Dems have been el stinko floppo three elections in a row. But Bush, for good or ill, believes in himself as the real Third Way deal: It's a remarkable achievement to get damned day in and day out as the new Hitler when 90 percent of the time you're Tony Blair with a ranch. The president is a religio-cultural conservative who believes in big government and big spending and paternalistic federal intervention in areas where few conservatives have ever previously thought it wise. Not my bag, but, that said, every time I or anybody else have predicted he's blown it, he manages to eke out another victory. Even the sluggishness of the war on terror seems likely to be partially redeemed by the imminent fall of Baby Assad. Given the transformational potential of 9/11 and the fact that the Democratic Party is all out of gas, I think the Bush-Rove incremental strategy is way too limited. But it seems to work, and I'd bet it does again on election day next year.