It looks like Bush went off-message again this morning and accidentally told the truth.
Q: Thank you, Mr. President. Why do people in this White House feel it is necessary to tell your supporters that Harriet Miers attends a very conservative Christian church? Is that your strategy to repair the divide that has developed among conservatives over her nomination?
Bush: People are interested to know why I picked Harriet Miers. They want to know Harriet Miers’ background. They want to know as much as they possibly can before they form opinions. Part of Harriet Miers’ life is her religion. Part of it has to do with the fact that she was a pioneer woman and a trailblazer in the law in Texas.
In other words, Bush is still trying to explain why Harriet Miers is his choice to sit on the Supreme Court, and today he admitted that Miers’ faith played a role in that selection.
I suspect the president didn’t intend to admit this, but now that he has, it gives the right a chance to spin 180 degrees.
After all, when Dick Durbin suggested that he believed questions about a nominee’s faith and the impact it might have on his or her judicial work are fair game, an indignant Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said, “We have no religious tests for public office in this country. And I think anyone would find that sort of inquiry, if it were actually made, offensive. And so I hope we don’t go down that road.”
Of course, that was the GOP message in August. Now it’s October — and Bush is going down that road with no brakes.
In a rare moment of agreement with Rich Lowry, he’s absolutely right that the hypocrisy here is stunning.
The nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court is foundering, but President Bush is confident that she will be confirmed. Bush thus displays a touching faith in the power of hypocrisy, double standards, and contradictions to see his nominee through. The case for Miers is an unholy mess, an opportunistic collection of whatever rhetorical flotsam happens to be at hand.
The White House and its allies have long argued that it is wrong to bring a judicial nominee’s faith into the discussion about his merits, and any attempt to do so amounts to religious bigotry. When it was suggested that John Roberts’s Catholic faith might be an area for inquiry in his confirmation, White House allies recoiled in horror.
Now the White House tells conservatives that Miers will vote the right way because she’s a born-again Christian. This is the chief reason that some prominent Christian conservatives are supporting her, in a blatant bit of right-wing identity politics. They apparently believe her religious faith will determine what she thinks about the equal-protection clause, the separation of powers, and other nettlesome constitutional issues. As sociology, there is something to this — an evangelical is more likely to be conservative than a Unitarian — but to place so much weight on Miers’s demographic profile, rather than her own merits and judicial philosophy, is noxious and un-American.
And this was Lowry before Bush admitted that Miers’ religion helped shape his selection of her in the first place.