Another Reason To Oppose Miers

Just when you thought the Miers nomination fiasco couldn’t sink any lower, just when you thought the White House couldn’t look any more ridiculous for nominating her, comes the questionnaire she returned to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which contains this response to Question 17, asking her to “describe in detail any cases or matters you addressed as an attorney or public official which involved constitutional questions”:

While I was an at-large member of the Dallas City Council, I dealt with issues that involved constitutional questions. For instance, when addressing a lawsuit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the council had to be sure to comply with the proportional representation requirement of the Equal Protection Clause. [p. 49]

There is, of course, no “proportional representation requirement” of the Equal Protection Clause, nor even in Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (though liberals in fact often act as though there were).

Almost as bizarre was the attempt of some scholars to fathom her meaning here. From an article in the Washington Post today:

“There is no proportional representation requirement in the Equal Protection Clause,” said Cass R. Sunstein, a constitutional law professor at the University of Chicago. He and several other scholars said it appeared that Miers was confusing proportional representation — which typically deals with ethnic groups having members on elected bodies — with the one-man, one-vote Supreme Court ruling that requires, for example, legislative districts to have equal populations.

It seems to me equally likely that Sunstein et. al. are confusing Miers with someone who knows at least something about equal protection law.

Miers’s “proportional representation” rubbish is deeply troubling beyond what it reveals about her knowledge, or lack thereof, of civil rights law. Indeed, she probably didn’t even write that answer, but if that’s the case she still signed her name to this errant nonsense. And, perhaps worse, someone the White House assigned to write the answer knows as little as she does about equal protection or, much worse, actually believes there is a “proportional representation” requirement, somewhere.

I would say this is the blind seeing-impaired leading the seeing-impaird, except I’m not sure anyone’s leading.

UPDATE

On the other hand, maybe Ms. Miers really did write this response herself, because it appears that she really does believe in proportional representation:

As president of the State Bar of Texas, Harriet Miers wrote that “our legal community must reflect our population as a whole,” and under her leadership the organization embraced racial and gender set-asides and set numerical targets to achieve that goal.

As usual in this unfortunate matter, the White House response simply makes things worse:

White House spokesman Jim Dyke said that Miers’s actions on the bar do not indicate a view on how Miers might rule on the big question before the Supreme Court, which is how far government can go to promote diversity.

“The best I can tell, this was a private-sector initiative to increase diversity, which is not the same thing as a government mandate of quotas,” he said.

Oh, I see. Private preferences based on race are fine, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 notwithstanding, and maybe even government discrimination that falls short of “a government mandate of quotas.”

This would be a good time for whoever is responsible for White House comments on Miers to remember the sage advice: when you’re standing in a hole, stop digging.

Jonah Goldberg:

It’s not just that Miers was in favor of racial quotas — we’d pretty much known that for a while. It’s the fundamental confirmation that she’s a go-along-with-the-crowd establishmentarian. The White House says that her enthusiastic support for goals, timetables and quotas at the Bar Association says nothing about her views on government race policies. Yeah, right. She simultaneously thought what she was doing was great and important while also believing it would be unconstitutional if the government did the same thing.

Stanley Kurtz:

Given what we’ve learned about Harriet Miers “passion” for racial quotas, I think it has to be conceded in nominating her, the president is reneging on a critical campaign promise. I strongly oppose her nomination.