SCOTUS-gate: What if Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers had been confirmed to the Supreme Court?

[babylonsister]

http://www.slate.com/id/2161910/nav/tap2/

SCOTUS-gate: What if Alberto Gonzales and Harriet Miers had been confirmed to the Supreme Court?
By Dahlia Lithwick

Nearly lost in all the hootin' and hollerin' about U.S. Attorney-gate is a delicious truth: Two of the worst offenders in this whole mess were at the top of President Bush's list to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancies last year. That's right, friends, had Bush had his way in the fall of 2005, we'd be looking today at a court fearlessly led by a Chief Justice Alberto Gonzales and starring an Associate Justice Harriet Miers.

Stop and savor the possibilities. Think what the past year at the high court would have looked like had the president managed to seat his two favorite lawyers. Just imagine, with me, the delicious scandals that might have ensued.

October 2005: Clerk-gate
Having won confirmation by a narrow margin, the new chief justice, Alberto Gonzales, takes his seat at the high court, bringing with him his four new law clerks, D. Kyle Sampson, Tim Griffin, Karl Rove, and Harriet Miers. Gonzales, at a press conference on the steps of the Supreme Court, announces that while it's certainly unusual to have a law clerk who is herself a nominee for a Supreme Court vacancy, the thought of being separated from Rove, the president, and Ms. Miers for any length of time was too awful to contemplate.

October 2005: Quaint-gate
Presiding over his first oral argument, Chief Justice Alberto Gonzales stuns the gallery by replacing the four golden bars former Chief Justice William Rehnquist affixed to his robes with an embroidered golden image of President George W. Bush. Gonzales also summarily revokes the Supreme Court rules governing the number of votes required in order to hear a case. Under the new regime only one vote is required so long as it comes from the president. And he announces that his aforementioned law clerks will now sit at his side during oral argument. Gonzales further decrees that nobody may interrupt the solicitor general during his portion of oral argument. When challenged by his colleagues on these unilateral decisions, Gonzales replies that the old court rules were "quaint" and that a "new kind of court requires a new paradigm."

November 2005: Clerk-gate, Part II
Former White House counsel/Gonzales clerk Harriet Miers is confirmed to the high court by a narrow margin. She brings with her as clerks Jenna Bush, Barbara Bush, and Laura Bush. When queried by sitting Justice Stephen Breyer as to whether she wouldn't prefer to have a law clerk who had studied the law at some point, Miers confidently pats her folio of Christmas cards and thank-you notes from the Bush family and says, "I have all the constitutional knowledge I need right here, thanks."

January 2006: You're-Fired-gate
Associate Justice Harriet Miers circulates an e-mail to her colleagues suggesting that since all Supreme Court law clerks serve at the justices' pleasure, they should be summarily fired so as to create new job possibilities for 36 new clerks. In a follow-up e-mail, she notes that, on second thought, there would be openings for only 35 new clerks under her scheme, as she would really like to keep Jenna.

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[global1]

1. This Raises An Interesting Question - What About The Two That.....

were put on the SCOTUS?

[babylonsister]

2. Ice cold bucket of reality was just thrown on me, by you. Thanks

a lot. :(
Really, very good albeit potentially scary question.:scared:

[n2doc]

4. Exactly

Roberts and Alito are far smarter and thus more dangerous than Gonzo and Harriet. Not that they will vote much differently, but Roberts and Alito have the ability to really screw things for us in ways we can't comprehend...

"You can arm yourself, alarm yourself
But theres nowhere you can run
cause a man with a briefcase
Can steal more money
Than any man with a gun"

-Don Henley- "Gimmie what you got"

[Benhurst]

3. We'd be better off.

We'd have two crooked Supremes exposed as opposed to two new crooked Supremes sitting on the bench unexposed.