Last week President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, hoping to fill the seat vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor.  It has caused no small firestorm, especially among the President’s conservative friends.  There is the possibility that the nomination could be sabotaged by the core of the President’s constituency.  Several thoughts about this controversial nomination.

• First some background about the nominee.  (1)  It is very clear that the President has once again turned to his inner circle for this nomination.  Harriet Miers was the President’s personal lawyer in Texas, served as that state’s bar association president and has served the President on his staff in Washington—as staff secretary, deputy chief of staff and counsel to the President.  The President and Karl Rove have worked with her for over ten years; they know her judicial philosophy and her temperament.  (2)  This nomination gives every appearance of seeking to avoid a bloodbath on the floor of the Senate.  The President’s logic seems to be:  I will select someone whom I know, whom I trust, and who will follow my conservative instincts.  She has never been a judge and has never served in any judicial area at the state or federal level.  This is not necessarily a problem, however, for nearly one-third of all justices who have served on the Court have never been judges.  Even Senate minority leader, Harry M. Reid, has applauded the fact that she is not a judge.  Since she has never been a judge, she has no paper trial of opinions or arguments that the opposition can use to defeat her nomination.  The problem for many conservatives, such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, is that Miers is not the sterling constitutional, conservative scholar they would like to see.  She is a lightweight constitutionally, when, in their judgment, there are several far more qualified conservative and sitting judges that Bush could have nominated.  The Party has a 55 vote majority in the Senate, they argue, and many are ready to defend a strongly conservative candidate.  But if the President succeeds in winning her confirmation and she turns out to be a reliably conservative justice, his gamble will have paid off.  Was this a nomination from weakness, as some have contended?  Or was this a shrewd move on the part of a President, who wishes to avoid the political bloodbath that would surely ensue were he to nominate a strongly conservative judge?  Was it wise or was it expedient?  We do not know—but time will tell.

• Second, is there any evidence of Harriet Miers’s convictions or hints of where she stands on the difficult cultural issues facing America?  What we do know is that Harriet Miers has publicly confessed her faith in Jesus Christ.  Further, friends from her church in Dallas, Valley View Christian Church, argue that her personal values have been shaped by her abiding faith in Jesus Christ, and by her church, where she was baptized as an adult, served on the missions committee and taught religious classes.  Her Dallas church consistently has spoken against abortion; against homosexuality as sin; and that the Bible is God’s literal Word.  Attendance at a conservative church and serving in that same church does not guarantee how a Supreme Court Justice will vote on key cultural issues; but it does say something about Miers as a person and as a Christian.  Her faith is important to her.  Further, she is joining a small group that is leaving Valley View Christian Church because this group wants to give more to missions.  Again, we do not know how she will decide key court decisions, but we do know she is a woman of faith—and that is positive.  See Michael Grunwald, Jo Becker and John Pomfret in the Washington Post (5 October 2005).  

• Third, as Douglas Kmiec has argued, Miers does share one very important trait with the new Chief Justice, John G. Roberts:  “They are both steadfast adherents to a judicial ethic of no personally imposed points of view.”  In other words, judges are asked to interpret the law fashioned by the legislature and are expected to be “objective, impartial and circumspect in deciding issues no more broadly than the legal dispute needing resolution.  Judges are to be fair and, while learning and practice in the law are expected, no justice is invited to propound a personal philosophy on the great issues of the universe: abortion, affirmative action, assisted suicide, or religion in public life.”  She has demonstrated a skill and acumen in the practice of law that few can match.  She was the first woman to break through the Texas “old-boy network” to be the managing partner of a firm of 400-plus lawyers.  She was elected Texas bar association president and has defended the ABA’s role in screening nominees to the court.  She worked hard to keep the ABA from endorsing Roe v. Wade!!  She has a reputation of hard work and her pro bono commitments in Texas to legal aid in immigration and civil cases are well known.  She is not a constitutional scholar of a John G. Roberts stature, but she has a reputation as a hard-working lawyer, who knows the law and knows ethics.  See Kmiec’s editorial in the Washington Post (4 October 2005).

• Finally, how have evangelical leaders responded to Bush’s nomination?  Marvin Olasky, founder of World magazine, has written, “Maybe it’s the judicial implications of her evangelical faith, unseen on the court in recent decades. . . Friends who know Miers well testify to her internal compass that includes a needle pointed toward Christ.”  James Dobson told Brit Hume, “We know people who have known her for 20, 25 years, and they would vouch for her. . . I know the church that she goes to and I know the people who go to her church with her.”  Dobson added, “I know the person who led her to the Lord.”  All of this is important information for us as we process this nomination.  However, we who are evangelicals must be very careful here.  We have always argued that a person’s religious faith should never be a reason to reject someone for office or from being nominated as a judge.  We cannot, therefore, make the argument that Miers’s religious faith makes her the best candidate for the position as Supreme Court Justice.  Those of us who are conservative have always argued that using religion as a reason for rejection violated the Constitution and any notion of religious freedom.  We must not, therefore, use her religious faith as the reason to support Miers.  The primary issue in choosing Harriet Miers to be the next Supreme Court Associate Justice must be her qualifications in the area of law, not her personal faith in Jesus Christ.  Martin Luther once said that he would rather be ruled by a competent Turk, than an incompetent Christian.  We must be very circumspect in how we discuss Harriet Miers, her faith and her qualifications to be on the Supreme Court.  See E.J. Dionne, Jr. in the Washington Post (7 October 2005).

The evidence is in and it is compelling:  Families matter and, if we as a civilization are interested in social justice and stability, we must not ignore the family.  John Leo has recently written, “. . . we are not talking about a problem of race but about a problem of family formation or, rather the lack of it.  The best outcomes for children—whether in academic performance, avoidance of crime and drugs, or financial and economic success—are almost invariably produced by married biological parents.  The worst results are by never-married women.”

The Washington-based Institute for Marriage and Public Policy examined 23 recent studies dealing with family structure and youth crime.  Leo summarizes the salient aspects of their findings:  In 19 of the 20 studies that found family structure to have an effect, children from non-intact or single-parent families had a higher rate of crime or delinquency.  One study even found that the more single-parent families there were in the neighborhood, the more crime there was among two-parent kids living around them.  (Again, these studies are controlled for race.) 

Other findings from the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy:

1. Adolescents in single-parent families were almost twice as likely to have pulled a knife or a gun on someone in the past year.  (This study again controlled for race, gender, age, household income and educational level of parents.) 
2. In a large sample of students in 315 classrooms in 11 cities, the “single most important variable” in gang involvement was found to be family structures.  As Leo observes, “In other words, the greater number of parents at home, the lower the level of gang involvement.”  Similarly, a study of American Indian families found that living in a two-parent family reduced gang involvement by more than 50%.
3. Another study concluded that out-of-wedlock childbearing had a large effect on the rate of arrests for murder, and effect that “seems to have gotten stronger over time.”
4. Another study reported that “Adolescents in married, two-biological-parent families generally fare better than children in any of the family types examined here.”  These “other types” include single mother, cohabiting stepfather and married stepfather families.
5. One study also found that divorce rates had no relationship to violent crime rates but that out-of-wedlock births had a strong relationship to youth crime—nearly 90% of the increase in violent crime between 1973 and 1995 was accounted for by the rise in out-of-wedlock births.

The Point?  There is a form of poverty that money will not cure.  Most Americans now believe that there is a strong connection between racism and poverty.  But these studies show something very different.  Leo masterfully summarizes:  “If you want to avoid poverty, finish high school, don’t have kids in your teens, and get married.”  But the politically correct crowd argues differently.  They argue that diverse family forms are positive and good for this postmodern generation.  All of the evidence demonstrates how utterly false that contention really is.  We are in a sad state of affairs.  Our civilization has bought a lie that diversity in family forms is good for us.  All the evidence shows that is false.  May God have mercy on us!

See Leo’s essay in US News and World Report (3 October 2005).

With the number of significant hurricanes over the last two years—and especially this year with Katrina and Rita—the question would naturally arise whether global warming is causing more intense hurricanes.  Are they getting worse and more frequent?

A recent scholarly paper in the journal Science dealt with this issue.  Hurricanes can only form over oceans that have a surface temperature above 26 degrees Centigrade.  Since average ocean temperatures have risen by about half a degree since 1970, this is an important question.  The author of the article, Dr. Peter Webster, examined the entire planet and the matter of ocean temperatures (i.e., the six ocean basins on its surface that act as hurricane nurseries).  Analyzing the sea-surface temperatures in the six basins (the North Atlantic, the West Pacific, the East Pacific, the Southwest Pacific, the North Indian Ocean and the South Indian Ocean), Webster found statistically significant temperature rises in all but the Southwest Pacific. 

The conclusion of Webster and his team is that whatever is increasing hurricane incidences it does not have anything to do with ocean warming per se.  If it were, such increases would have shown up in other places where the sea is getting warmer.  What the Webster study does show is that hurricanes are increasing and they are increasing in their ferocity—4 or 5 category storms on the scale used by meteorologists.  The second largest increase in storms has been in the Southwest Pacific, where no significant temperature rise was observed.  One cannot, therefore, argue that sea-surface temperature rise is the cause of larger numbers and more ferocious hurricanes.  There is no doubt that there are more nasty hurricanes.  What is far less certain is why.  Let’s be critical thinkers when someone says that global warming is causing more hurricanes.  Webster’s study shows that this is not the case.

See a summary of the Webster study in The Economist (17 September 2005).