One theory of the intra-conservative split over the Harriet Miers nomination is that she’s being sold to conservative evangelical Christians as “one of their own,” with all the carping from elite opinion-leaders on the Right representing a continuation of the much-alleged discrimination against evangelicals, from a different direction.Indeed, there’s been talk, undoubtedly abetted by the White House, that Miers’ appointment represents the establishment of an “evangelical seat” on the Supreme Court, similar to the “Jewish seat” that supposedly existed for much of the twentieth century.Amy Sullivan punctures the idea that Miers is the first evangelical to get nominated to the Court, citing the (then-) evangelical Episcopalian Clarence Thomas, but go back a bit further and you find Southern Baptist Hugo Black, and a significant number of southern Methodists.But in any event, this effort to attach conservative evangelicals to the Miers nomination as a matter of group identity is obviously ironic given the supposed hostility of conservatives to group entitlements. And it’s also casts some new light on the peculiar but characteristic Christian Right conviction that anyone who loves Jesus and reads the Bible will reach the same conclusions about issues like abortion and homosexuality.Lord knows I’ve spilled a lot of ink exploring and criticizing that assumption, and in casting doubt on its accuracy with respect to Miers herself. But it has certainly become a central feature of the Christian Right’s own self-justification for its decisive and spiritually hazardous commitment to partisan politics, and perhaps the White House figured that out in making its own politically hazardous commitment to this nomination.

In my last post, I painstakingly put together an analysis of the religious tradition that Harriet Miers has embraced, concluding that it doesn’t much provide definitive evidence of her probable views on issues like abortion. Imagine my chagrin when I picked up the newspaper the next day to discover that her sometimes boyfriend and fellow parishioner at Valley View Christian Church, the right-wing Texas Supreme Court Justice Nathan Hecht, has been running around telling anybody who would listen that there’s zero doubt about Miers’ views on abortion.In my own long discourse on Miers religious background, I concluded that the nexus between her religion and her judicial philosophy would probably remain a mystery so long as “she and her friends and associates decide to keep it that way.” Well, Hecht would certainly qualify as someone in that inner loop; after all, he’s the one who introduced Miers to Valley View about a quarter century ago, when she, a lapsed Catholic, was seeking a renewed spiritual life.And indeed, Hecht’s assertions seem to be having an effect in some circles. The influential conservative evangelical Marvin Olasky (best known as the coiner of the phrase “compassionate conservatism”) has placed great stock in Hecht’s assurances in his cautiously pro-Miers blog posts. More importantly, the ultimate Christian Right bigfoot, James Dobson, in his bizarre radio remarks yesterday defending his early support for Miers, mentions his friendship with “the man who brought her to the Lord” as one part of the “confidential” information persuading him. This is clearly a reference to Hecht.But is Hecht speaking for himself, for Miers, and for the White House? Well, it’s not like he’s some loose cannon with no insider connections. Karl Rove ran his first campaign for the Texas Supreme Court. He knows the president well enough that W. has bestowed him with one of his famous personal nicknames: “Hector.” It sure looks like he’s on a mission from the administration to help preempt any Christian Right revolt against this nomination.But the weird thing is: it may not be working that well. Yes, the latest C.W. among the chattering classes is that the intra-conservative fight over Miers is one of those Main Street/Country Club fights pitting the GOP’s Christian Right base against snobby elitists who care more about a prospective justice’s legal resume than about her willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade. Indeed, some point to the non-Christians prominent in the conservative opposition to Miers (e.g., David Frum, Bill Kristol) and luridly suggest a big-time Theocon/Neocon split.I don’t think so. Aside from Frum, most of the National Review luminaries (e.g., Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru) who are prominent in the revolt against Miers are serious Right-to-Life Catholics. Nobody can out-Main Street Phyllis Schlafly, another Miers skeptic. Nobody’s more focused on cultural issues like abortion than Paul Weyrich. Tony Perkins, Dobson’s comrade-in-arms in the Colorado Springs Empire, has been notably neutral on the nomination.And even Dobson himself is expressing doubts and fears on Miers and the abortion issue, noting in the radio address that he will have “the blood of all those babies” on his hands if he guesses wrong about her views.You have to figure at this point that the White House is playing a dangerous double game on Miers, trying to get the word out to the Cultural Right that she’s a sure vote to overturn Roe, without providing any evidence that could blow up on her during the confirmation hearings. The fact that the Cultural Right is split on Miers is an indication this preemptive strategy has failed, which means that conservatives as well as Democrats are going to press her and the White House for clearer answers to their questions.My guess is that “Hector” will now shut up, leaving Rove and company to come up with a new strategy for threading this particular needle. It won’t be easy.

Inevitably, Harriet Miers’ religious views are going to get some scrutiny in the very near future, particularly since the initial reaction to her nomination from Christian Right leaders was significantly warmer than that of other conservatives. So far, all the press seems to have figured out is that she spent many years as a devoted member of a “conservative evangelical church” in suburban Dallas, and that she was raised as a (apparently nonobservant) Catholic.I did a little quick research last night on Valley View Christian Church, and also happen to know a bit about the tradition it comes from, so I thought I’d share this analysis for future reference. Keep in mind that I am at best an amateur Church historian, so this account may well include errors, though I profoundly hope it gets the big issues right.VVCC is an independent “Christian” church aligned with the conservative wing of the Campbell-Stone “Restorationist” tradition. It’s closely related to the conservative quasi-denomination, the Churches of Christ, and more distantly related to the mainline protestant Disciples of Christ.[IMPORTANT NOTES: the term “Restorationist” is occasionally applied to “Reconstructionism” or “Dominion Theology,” a scary theocratic movement of recent vintage. It has no connection whatsoever with historic “Restorationists,” or with Harriet Miers. And no one should confuse the conservative “Churches of Christ” with the “United Church of Christ,” a very liberal denomination created by the merger of the Congregationalists with German Reformed Churches in the 1940s].”Restorationism” is a distinctly American religious tradition, a product of the Second Great Awakening on the midwestern and southern frontier, largely under the leadership of Thomas Campbell and Barton Stone, both former Presbyterians who were troubled by denominational and intradenominational rivalries. The basic idea of “restorationism” was a systematic effort to return to what its adherents understood as the practices of the Primitive Church, rejecting “human” creeds, theological traditions (Protestant and well as Catholic), and sectarian denominations, with Scripture, and especially the New Testament, serving as the only source of authority in all matters.Ironically, under the leadership of Thomas Campbell’s son Alexander, the restorationists created their own denomination (albeit a loosely organized, congregationally-based denomination with a strong commitment to ecumenism), the Disciples of Christ, which grew most rapidly in the Midwest and Southwest. Their most distinctive feature was an insistence on weekly communion (most evangelical denominations, following the Calvinist practice, had long detached communion from regular Sunday worship and observed it irregularly) along with a continuing hostility to theological speculation or creeds.Eventually, and roughly at the same time that the Fundamentalist Controversy broke out in the larger Protestant denominations, a significant minority of conservative Disciples, especially in the South and Southwest, drifted out of the Disciples, most affiliating with the new Churches of Christ but others simply becoming “independent Christian” congregations like VVCC. While conservative Restorationists maintained the traditional Disciples belief in biblical inerrancy (echoing Thomas Campbell’s famous slogan: “Where Scripture speaks, we speak; where it is silent, we are silent”) other factors distinctive to restorationists were more important, particularly an insistence on adult baptism by full immersion and rejection of the Disciples’ gradual acceptance of musical instruments to accompany singing in church. But the most important contributor to the split was the conservatives’ belief that restorationists were the “one true church” replicating the Primitive Church, which, given their anti-credal and anti-denominational biases, paradoxically made them increasingly sectarian and preoccupied with “scripturally sound” doctrine, especially in matters of worship.Little has changed in the Churches of Christ and their “independent” satellites in the last century, aside from their rapid growth.Most conservative restorationists dislike the label “fundamentalist,” mainly because the fundamentalist movement in the larger denominations involved theological arguments alien to their own tradition. But they certainly share the fundamentalist position on biblical inerrancy, with an important twist: the tenet that “where [Scripture] is silent, we are silent” has made conservative restorationists much less likely to get involved, at least as a group, in battles over matters like abortion where there are virtually no direct Scriptural references, especially in the New Testament. Indeed, a 1998 article in Restoration Quarterly excoriated Churches of Christ for lagging behind other conservative evangelicals in full-throated commitment to the anti-abortion cause.What complicates this question is the conservative restorationist hostility to denominational order, formal doctrinal statements, and other “litmus tests.” These are not Southern Baptists who insist on examining their clergy and staff in search of heresy; they have few formal organs for pronouncing anathemas even if they wanted to; and much of their literature focuses on controversies like whether to use one or two cups at communion, not quasi-political topics.And this formal silence is characteristic even more of “independent” congregations like VVCC. Even if 90 to 100 precent of conservative restorationist clergy have convinced themselves the Bible does speak to the abortion issue, the gay rights issue, the school prayer issue, and other cultural matters that may come before the Supreme Court, few would know it outside their individual congregations.So: what does all of this mean in terms of “the religious question” as it relates to Harriet Miers nomination? The obvious answer is that like other aspects of her philosophy, the influence of her religious beliefs on her judicial thinking is ultimately a mystery so long as she and her friends and associates decide to keep it that way.A Washington Post profile on Miers reported that Valley View Christian Church occasionally screens Focus on the Family films, and has anti-abortion literature available in the vestibule. That kind of circumstantial evidence is probably the only kind that will turn up. Like Harriet Miers herself, her faith tradition doesn’t supply much in the way of “paper trails” on the subjects that may affect her confirmation or rejection.

This has been one of those arguably rare days when being a political junkie gives one a better insight into a major news development than just watching it on television. Why? Because the reaction to Bush’s nomination of White House Counsel (and before that, his personal lawyer) Harriet Miers has been an extremely dynamic story, in ways that may have a major bearing not only on this particular event, but on the political landscape generally.Watching CNN this afternoon, the reporting about Miers was very muddled and misleading: she seemed to have broad bipartisan support in the Senate, though some conservatives were worried about her views. There was lots of RNC-talking-points-inspired talk about all the glass ceilings she had shattered in Texas legal circles, but little about her actual qualifications for the Supreme Court.But if you were following this via blogs, emails, and phone conversations, the story was very different. There was almost universal astonishment among the legal congnescenti, right, left and center, when Miers was named. Sure, she was on most of the lists of possible nominees that had been circulating for months, but virtually no one thought she’d actually get the nod.After the initial shock died down, conservatives began reacting very negatively, not just because her judicial philosophy was a mystery, but because of her slender resume. I don’t have the time to link to all these posts I read, but just go to redstate.org and National Review Online (especially The Corner) and read what they were saying this morning and most of the afternoon, and it’s pretty amazing. Conservatives were mocking her qualifications; conservatives were deliberately drawing the cronyist analogy to “Brownie;” conservatives were angrily denouncing the White House/RNC talking points about her.Here’s just one example: a post by National Review editor Rich Lowry at The Corner:

Just talked to a very pro-Bush legal type who says he is ashamed and embarrassed this morning. Says Miers was with an undistinguished law firm; never practiced constitutional law; never argued any big cases; never was on law review; has never written on any of the important legal issues. Says she’s not even second rate, but is third rate. Dozens and dozens of women would have been better qualified. Says a crony at FEMA is one thing, but on the high court is something else entirely. Her long history of activity with ABA is not encouraging from a conservative perspective–few conservatives would spend their time that way. In short, he says the pick is “deplorable.” There may be an element of venting here, but thought I’d pass along for what it’s worth. It’s certainly indicative of the mood right now.

The worm began to gradually turn mid-day; you could almost hear the humming of the spin cycle. At noon, I did something I can rarely stomach: I listened to Rush Limbaugh’s show, and this famously articulate if deranged Big Mouth sounded atypically confused and incoherent, wanting to pile on to the conservative line of “betrayal,” but holding back somewhat, apparently waiting for reassurance. And sure enough, by the end of his three-hour show, he had made time for an emergency appearance by none other than Dick Cheney (who also appeared on Sean Hannity’s show), who provided a personal pledge that Miers was rock-solid conservative.As the afternoon wore on, more voices supporting Miers spread across the conservative commentariat (Marvin Olansky and Hugh Hewitt in particular). And at day’s end, the Big Bertha weighed in with a qualified approval: James Dobson of Focus on the Family.So: given the trend, I would expect most conservative shrieking about Miers to die down tomorrow, but as Dobson’s fire-extinguisher statement indicated, there will be a big price to pay during the confirmation hearings: conservatives will demand some serious reassurance about her “judicial philosophy.” And those “reassurances” will provide serious ammunition to Democrats, who have generally and wisely kept their mouths pretty much shut today, other than vaguely positive statements about Miers’ apparent lack of ideological commitment, and general injunctions for more information and robust confirmation hearings.More broadly, you have to wonder why Bush nominated this particular non-judge. The White House clearly did not vet Miers with conservative activists and flacks in advance; their initial reaction is proof positive of that. As everyone concedes, her qualifications are questionable for a lower-court federal judgeship, much less The Big One. Miers virtually demands a sharp contrast with Roberts, whose resume was strong precisely on the points where hers is weak. And most of all, you’d think the White House would go far out of its way to avoid any possible linkage of this supremely important lifetime appointment to its pattern of cronyism in other appointments, given the enduring stain of “Brownie.”All day long, you half-expected someone to facetiously report that Bush gave Miers the big news with the words: “Harriet, you’re doin’ a heckuva job.” Given her personal links to Bush, and probably to the First Lady (who was a contemporary of Miers at SMU), the nominee is painfully dependent on the eroding degree of trust that conservatives, Republicans, the Senate, and the country still have for George W. Bush.We’ll soon know how it plays out, but I really don’t understand what Bush and Rove were thinking with this troublesome nomination.

During a busy weekend down in Central Virginia where, literally, I had to see a man about a horse, I got a bit of reading done about African history.I’m currently reading two relatively new and very important books: Gerard Prunier’s Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, and Martin Meredith’s The Fate of Africa.Prunier’s book makes it clear early on that the present slow-motion genocide in Darfur is the product of the region’s perenially secondary status in a long series of external political and military conflicts, and of a heightened and largely artificial distinction between “Arabs” and “Africans” that was fed not only by Khartoum’s politicians but by outside players, most especially Libya’s Ghaddafi.Meredith’s book is a massive history of post-colonial Africa that encapsulates and (in a country-by-country manner) details the long decline of social and economic progress of the continent since the early days of hope immediately after independence. Meredith is especially compelling in explaining the economic impact of failed Western and Marxist development models for Africa, and how they contributed to the rapid decline in democracy and human rights observances in all but a few countries.I’ll write more about these books when I’ve finished them, but you should definitely read them if you have the chance. Given the recent interest in Africa stimulated by the humanitarian disasters in Rwanda and Darfur; the political crisis in Zimbabwe; and the focus on AIDS relief and debt forgiveness that Tony Blair has helped make a major priority for the world’s economic titans: this is a subject on which we must all begin to understand the basics.

Sen. Barack Obama has done a very interesting post over at DailyKos schooling netroots activists about over-reaction to dissenters from party orthodoxy, and more generally about how to keep the big picture in mind. The post has drawn a remarkable number of comments, most of them positive. And you should also check out Markos’ own response, which concedes Obama’s general point and basically says Democratic dissenters ought to better explain their positions.Not surprisingly, I agree with just about everything Obama says, but beyond that, I just have to marvel at this guy’s ability to consistently lift discussion of almost every topic to a higher plane.

I had a very interesting morning at the Day Job. The DLC’s think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute, held a forum on the changing politics of judicial nominations, featuring Stuart Taylor of National Journal, Jeffrey Rosen of George Washington University and The New Republic, and yours truly.PPI’s Will Marshall moderated and introduced us, and after citing Taylor and Rosen’s impressive legal resumes, mentioned my law degree from the University of Georgia and said: “It’s good to have some kudzu among the ivy here today.” After some consideration, I decided to take that as a compliment.It fell to me to serve as the defender of Democrats who voted against Roberts’ nomination, and, more generally, to remind everyone of the real roots of the recent polarization of judicial nominations, in the devil’s bargain the GOP has made with the Cultural Right. I also took issue with the idea that it would be just peachy keen for progressives if abortion policy were returned to Congress and state legislatures.If you’re interested, the forum will probably be offered up to insomniacs at some point this weekend over CSPAN or CSPAN2. Or you can check out the streaming video available via CSPAN3. If you do, please kindly ignore my face-made-for-radio and listen to what I said. I did wear a cool red-white-and-blue donkey tie.

Well, the big news today has been the surprise decision of a Texas grand jury to indict House GOP Leader Tom DeLay for a criminal conspiracy to violate that state’s ban on corporate campaign contributions. I’ve written about the broader implications of this thunderbolt over at TPMCafe, and the DLC weighed in institutionally in a manner that I cannot really improve on.The really big picture is that all sorts of chickens are now coming home to roost for the GOP. You can hear them clucking all over Washington: in the White House, where the FBI investigation of Jack Abramoff is now penetrating the previously impermeable heart of Bush Era politics and policy; in the conservative commentariat, which is now torn between defending the Republican establishment and accusing it of betraying its principles; and in Congress, where DeLay’s troubles are creating a power vaccum among GOPers for whom power has been the only unifying principle. More and more, the Bush Era is beginning to resemble the Harding Era, without the humanizing features of sex and liquor. The self-righteous, clean-living (when it comes to private behavior other than indulgence in interest-group financed golf junkets) Tom DeLay is a perfect symbol of today’s GOP, and its unacknowledged sins.

This is going to be a rather self-indulgent post, but perhaps of interest to those of you who are into in political history, or just history.On Sunday I did a post about the big antiwar rally in Washington, and by way of suggesting that this assemblage wasn’t as radical as it might have been, reminisced about an antiwar rally I attended in Atlanta in 1970 in which Trotskyist cadres coopted a bunch of peaceniks into marching alongside Viet Cong flags.My colleague The Moose, a fellow baby boomer who shared my youthful flirtation with Marxism back in the day, upbraided me by the water cooler to inform me that my memoir was objectively impossible, since the Socialist Workers Party and its collegiate wing, the Young Socialist Alliance, had in fact promulgated a Popular Front Party Line that eschewed identification with the NLF, or indeed, any message other than “U.S. Out of Vietnam Now.”The Moose knows his Trotskyists very well. Indeed, after subjecting me to a round of criticism-and-self-criticism about my understanding of SWP policies, he went on to school me on the particular provenance of the Workers World Party (one of the indirect sponsors of the rally in Washington this weekend), which was born as a protest against the SWP’s condemnation of the Soviet supression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.But I remember what I remember from 1970, as I trudged along in an antiwar march controlled by YSA activists, under the watchful eye of local SWP boss and future perennial presidential candidate Linda Jenness, an Atlanta native, and as YSA bullhorns redundantly intoned pro-NLF chants.I have no idea if, or if so, how many, Vietnam-era Marxists read New Donkey, but if so, we need some arbitation here. Was I ignorantly witnessing some weird Atlanta-based Left Deviationist strain of American Trotskyism? Was the march actually controlled by agents of RYM (Revolutionary Youth Movement) II, the residue of SDS after RYM I (a.k.a., the Weathermen) and the Progressive Labor Party (briefly the home of Lyndon Larouche) left? Was the whole thing an FBI plant?Inquiring minds want to know. And the whole subject is a reminder that today’s internecine battles on the Left are a pale reflection of what they used to be, back when state socialism was still cool.

Remember this spring’s premium Blonde In Peril, Ashley Smith?You know, Ashley Smith, the Atlanta woman who was taken hostage in her apartment by fugitive cop-killer Brian Nichols, and eventually lulled him into submission by reading him a few passages from the Christian Self-Help classic The Purpose-Driven Life.Well, Ashley released a book today, and turns out that in dealing with Nichols she had something up her sleeve other than the wisdom of Rick Warren. In an interview with the Atlanta Constitution, she allows as how she gave the killer her personal stash of crystal meth.Smith did not, however, join Nichols in a quick, convivial snort. “I was not going to die tonight and stand before God, having done a bunch of ice up my nose,” she writes.And people wonder why I love the South.In any event, this disclosure probably cost Smith a guaranteed spot in the gallery next to the First Lady for George W. Bush’s next State of the Union Address.But she appears to have decided to take her story to a loftier venue. She’s appearing on Oprah tomorrow.