I had a dream about Harriet Miers the other night. (Yes, yes, I know: Cooper, get a life.) The dream — not my narrative unconscious at its most exciting, I'm afraid — involved George Bush withdrawing her nomination. That's all I remember. However — and here is where this transcends a dreary "I had a dream that had nothing to do with sex" anecdote — I woke up in a bad mood. (You think I'm making this up. I assure you, if I were making this up it would be way less banal.)
Why, I wondered to myself, would such a dream be a bad dream? After all, I've already weighed in on the Miers question — I believe I dubbed her a "joke."
Well, upon reflection, I've decided that she's a good joke. A joke that deserves to be told. A joke at which, I strongly believe, we shall laugh last.
First of all, let's consider what would have been the least funny nomination. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Janice Rogers Brown, very much on the shortlist, who is quoted as deprecating Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal as "our own socialist revolution." (I often wonder what people who hate the New Deal think of fondly. The Great Depression? The age of the robber barons?)
It's worth concentrating upon those words, which would have done McCarthy proud. Now, the thing about a "revolution," when appended to the word "socialist," is that it tends to imply barricades and streets awash in blood. Especially in America, where the word "socialist" really means "communist" to the average non-socialist. The New Deal was, of course, bloodless, not a revolution, and not really socialist. It was, however, civilized.
For originalists like Judge Brown, of particular interest is "freedom of contract" — which, though not in the Constitution, is treated as if it were not only there, but a very pillar of our civic structure. The notion of freedom of contract comes from the Lochner decision of 1905, in which the Supreme Court decided in favor of a bakery owner, Joseph Lochner, who felt that a New York law limiting his bakers to a sixty-hour work week was unconstitutional.
Lochner challenged the constitutionality of his conviction on the grounds that it violated his rights under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. In a 5-4 decision, a majority of the United States Supreme Court agreed with him, ruling that the New York law interfered "with the right of contract between the employer and employees concerning the number of hours in which the latter may labor."
Article comments
1 - Alethinos
DAC, you've certainly got a point. I think ALL of us who are not crazy about Mier shudder at the thought of Brown being on the Court. Excellent post.
Alethinos
2 - Dave Nalle
Odd, on reading her record Brown sounded pretty good to me. Except for the abortiion issue where she'd probably put it back in state control as it probably should always have been legally, she's got a record of pretty sound positions on constitutional issues, despite the fearmongering found in the middle of this article.
Dave
3 - Dave Nalle
Odd, on reading her record Brown sounded pretty good to me. Except for the abortiion issue where she'd probably put it back in state control as it probably should always have been constitutionally, she's got a record of pretty sound positions on constitutional issues, despite the fearmongering found in the middle of this article.
Dave
4 - Maurice
I have no axe to grind with the SS issue because I am 50 years old and there is no way for them to fix it so I can get the money out that I paid in. You young bloggers though really ought to think about SS reform.
What if I told you that you could get all your money back and more? Throw out all the arguments you've heard against it and try to imagine yourself retiring with $2K a month instead of $1K.
If that was the case would you be so against SS reform?
5 - Douglas Anthony Cooper
Well, reform is one thing. I think it's probably necessary. But what Bush has been pushing as "reform," is, as I say, really an attempt to gut the whole program.
As for your beloved Brown, Dave -- you might want to read "A White Shade of Pale," her speech in which she criticizes Holmes's dissent re: Lochner. Astonishingly reactionary stuff -- she argues that the New Deal descends directly from Marx and Engels, via the Terror and the Russian Revolution.
6 - Marcia L. Neil
As chronological age continues, some learn that 'Harriet Miers' might be a candidate to sit on the U. S. Supreme Court so that all other politically significant 'Harriets' will be compel-led to spill their brain content as a random access memory phenomena -- a cruel if not Spanish undertaking.