Ah, but perhaps you were unaware of Miers' many other accomplishments. Apparently she was THE FIRST WOMAN in Dallas to have a swimming pool in her back yard! And she was THE FIRST WOMAN with a safety deposit box at the Dallas National Bank! And she was THE FIRST WOMAN to wear pants at her law firm! It's simply amazing! And did you know she did all this while being a woman? ...
Which brings us to the other enraging argument being made by the Bush administration and its few remaining defenders — the claim of "elitism." I also don't know when the Republican Party stopped being the party of merit and excellence and became the party of quotas and lying about test scores, but I don't like that development either.
The average LSAT score at SMU Law School is 155. The average LSAT at Harvard is 170. That's a difference of approximately 1 1/2 standard deviations, a differential IQ experts routinely refer to as "big-ass" or "humongous." Whatever else you think of them, the average Harvard Law School student is very smart. I gather I have just committed a hate crime by saying so.
The LSAT is a good measure of rational intelligence, but it's not a good measure of common sense. That's why you can find so many liberals at top-tier schools who spout complete nonsense with perfect English. They end up convincing themselves that you can defeat al Qaeda, for example, with law enforcement techniques. Or that a local government seizing a person's home to give to a corporation that bribed the city council is a perfectly constitutional thing to do. I work with plenty of people who attended Harvard (my firm heavily recruits from the ivy leagues), and, speaking as a non-ivy leaguer, they are no better than most from a top 25 ranked school (mine was in the top 25, but was not an ivy league). Many of them are unrepentant leftists. Still, without a doubt, on average a person attending a higher ranked school will be smarter than someone from a mid or lower ranked school.
My problem with Miers isn't that she didn't attend a better school, but that she has no demonstrable judicial philosophy (let alone one consistent with Scalia or Thomas). She also has no record outside of school which would demonstrate her skills as a lawyer. Being a hack for the Texas Bar Association is certainly not a qualifier (it's idiotic that certain people would suggest that it is). Hugh Hewitt's snide references to elitism are really wearing thin, and his constant suggestion that her religion is equal to having a conservative jurisprudential philosophy is just stupid. There are plenty of conservatives who, plainly speaking, couldn't tell you the most basic meaning of the Establishment clause if they tried.
No comments:
Post a Comment