The headline news today on the Miers nomination is Laura Bush’s suggestion that resistance to the nominee among conservatives may be based on reflexive sexism, an argument that made the Right go nuts when RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie articulated it in private meetings earlier on.But the more important news, written up by David Kirkpatrick in today’s New York Times, is that there is a revolt brewing among Republican Senate staffers, especially those on the Judiciary Committee, against the nomination:

As the White House seeks to rally senators behind the Supreme Court nomination of Harriet E. Miers, lawyers for the Republican senators on the Judiciary Committee are expressing dissatisfaction with the choice and pushing back against her, aides to 6 of the 10 Republican committee members said yesterday.”Everybody is hoping that something will happen on Miers, either that the president would withdraw her or she would realize she is not up to it and pull out while she has some dignity intact,” a lawyer to a Republican committee member said.All the Republican staff members insisted on anonymity for fear of retaliation from their supervisors and from the Senate leaders.

At two stormy meetings on Friday – the first a planning meeting of the chief counsels to Republican committee members and the second a Republican staff meeting with Ed Gillespie, the former Republican Party chairman who is helping to lobby for the nomination – committee lawyers were unanimous in their dismay over Ms. Miers’s qualifications and conservative credentials, several attendees said….”You could say there is pretty much uniform disappointment with the nomination at the staff level,” another Republican on the committee staff said. “It is clear there is quite a bit of skepticism, and even some flashes of hostility.”Another Republican aide close to the committee said, “I don’t know a staffer who approves of this nomination, anywhere. Most of it is outright hostility throughout the Judiciary Committee staff.”In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Specter emphasized that the senators would make their own decisions.”I think those staffers, like anybody else, have a right to their opinions and to express them,” he said. “Senators will make independent judgments. You have some pretty strong staffers on the committee, but you have got some stronger senators.”

Specter’s quote is very interesting, because (a) it appears to be his own Judiciary Committee staff who are the chief grousers about Miers, and (b) throughout his long Senate career, the Pennsylvanian has consistently distinguished himself for imperious treatment of staff in an institution where Sun King disdain for the opinions of underlings is standard.You don’t have to put on a tin-foil hat to wonder if Specter is playing a double game on Miers, especially given his own rather conflicted comments about her qualifications. Maybe the White House’s well-known injunctions to Specter to get along better with conservatives are producing some unintended and ironic consequences.

I wasn’t inclined to comment on the relatively-little-noticed topic of Joe Lieberman’s attendance at the 50th anniversary dinner for National Review. But my colleague The Moose has more or less challenged my mammalhood or Murrowhood if I fail to weigh in, so I will.Let me warn you: this is going to be one of those long posts that probably depress this site’s traffic while offering up easy targets for people who will stop reading once they hit a bump in the argument. But stick with it if you can; it’s an interesting subject when you dig a bit deeper. For those of you who missed it, Atrios went after Lieberman for his prominent position at the NR dinner, citing a 1957 National Review editorial that defended the South’s efforts to ban voting rights for African-Americans on grounds that it was defending a “superior” civilization. Markos linked to Atrios, but appeared to simply (and rather mildly) deplore Lieberman’s action on the usual fraternization-with-the-enemy grounds. The Moose demanded an apology for Atrios’ implicit argument that Lieberman was endorsing racism, or at least hanging out with known racists, given Joe’s own sterling civil rights record. Steve Gilliard fired back, arguing that Joe is dishonoring his own personal history by hanging out with racists, adducing NR’s recent comments on Katrina as fresh evidence of its racism.These folks are obviously talking past each other, but the exchange does raise some important points about acceptable and unacceptable opposition viewpoints; about history, memory, and forgiveness (or unforgiveness); and about the moral dilemmas involved in appearing in “enemy forums.” More to the point, it raises three questions:1) Is William F. Buckley a racist with whom no self-respecting Democrat should fraternize? By way of full disclosure, I grew up reading National Review and Buckley’s columns and books (along with a lot of other pundits ranging from Frantz Fanon to Joseph de Maistre), and like many people from all points of view, enjoyed his acerbic style of writing and debate on purely aesthetic grounds. (I have also published one article in NR, making the case for a Democratic House win in 1998, along with several election-prediction-and-analysis gigs on their web page, though not recently). That did not mean I agreed with or even found acceptable his underlying political philosphy, but sometimes you just had to LOL.An example (most of WFB’s material is ungooglable, so you’ll just have to trust my prodigious memory for this kind of trivia): On some late -1960s talk show, the actress Shelley Winters (as ubiquitous on the Talks back then as Charo and Monty Rock IV were in later years) was asked why she was a Democrat, and she replied that as a child growing upon in the Depression, “Franklin Roosevelt gave me a hot bowl of soup while Herbert Hoover hated me.” Commented Buckley: “Really, Mr. Hoover was a man of extraordinary foresight.”Another: when Eleanor Roosevelt said she was never under any circumstances cross a picket line, Buckley called on “patriotic citizens to immediately post a 24-hour picket line around Hyde Park.”And still another: during his Conservative Party bid for Mayor of New York in 1965, Buckley was asked what his first action would be if he won. “Demand a recount,” he said.And one more, which is relevant to the current controversy: confronted with claims that open racists were supporting his mayoral candidacy, Buckley said: “Look, you, whoever you are, I don’t want your vote. Go back to your fever swamps and find somewhere else to peddle your nonsense.”On other occasions, Buckley penned extraordinarily eloquent explanations of conservative cultural impulses that are still very relevant today. In an agonized column on his visceral reaction to the post-Vatican II vernacular mass, he wrote that it was like “entering Chartres Cathedral and finding the stained glass replaced by pop art posters of Jesus sitting in against the slumlords of Milwaukee.”Believe it or not, I’m not old enough to have read the late-1950s editorial that Atrios cited–and which managed to shock me, as it would probably shock Joe Lieberman–but I do remember NR’s and Buckley’s various rationalizations for supporting Barry Goldwater’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Worse yet, a few years ago I ran across a collection of Buckley columns from the late 1960s that I had bought decades ago which included several about Dr. Martin Luther King. They were not racist according to the commonly accepted definitions of that term, but exhibited a moral obtuseness that is now breathtaking.Yet Buckley later recanted about civil rights, not abjectly or systematically, but still definitively. I distinctly remember a column observing that for African-Americans in a Jim Crow society, the refusal to dignify the laws and political processes that sustained that society was the only true option.The most compelling argument (as The Moose reminded me today) for rejecting the idea that fraternization with Buckley is sinful is the history of his 33-year television show, Firing Line. Buckley’s very first guest was Norman Thomas, the venerable American socialist leader. And that was typical. As one obiturist for the show when it finally expired put it:

”Firing Line” became a necessary stop for the leading liberal figures of the era. Muhammad Ali, Allen Ginsberg, Jesse Jackson, William M. Kunstler and Murray Kempton, among others, all made appearances. Mr. Buckley was helped by close friendships with liberals like Mr. Galbraith and Ira Glasser, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

I vividly remember another show where the guest was then-Congressman Ron Dellems (who’s now mulling a comeback run for mayor of Oakland), who was a national hero for what would now be called Progressive Caucus Democrats. One of Firing Line‘s regular features was a panel of younger politicos, from the U.S. and the U.K., and from the Left and Right, who shared in the questioning and debate; American participants included Mark Green and Michael Kinsley. For decades, the show was Crossfire with a much higher I.Q.; more genuine diversity of opinion; and more actual debate.Now, you can argue that all the liberals and even socialists who hung out with Buckley on the air (much closer than we are to the racist editorial of 1957) were themselves morally obtuse. But it is very clear that treating him like he’s David Duke misses much of why people have paid attention to him and his magazine and television show over the years.If this sounds a bit like the Ezra Pound Defense (an appreciation of the stylist’s contributions trumping his obnoxious views and even his contributions to historic wrongs), so be it. Maybe to young bloggers Buckley is nothing more than one of the original and most extreme architects of the Noise Machine, but back in the day, he was much more, and was acknowledged as such by just about everybody. That’s the point E.J. Dionne was making in his column today about Buckley. Presumably, that’s a lot of what was being celebrated at the dinner Joe Lieberman attended.2) Are there new rules about fraternization with the Right? I suspect some young-and-angry Democratic readers will react to what I’ve said, and what E.J. said, by responding: This is the problem with all you old bastards in Washington. You don’t recognize the enemy when you see him, and you value your insider connections to the enemy so much that you don’t know when he’s cutti
ng your stupid throat.Well, personally, I don’t have that many insider connections to much of anybody; don’t get invited to anybody’s big dinners; and am aware that my own ever-increasing partisanship in the Age of Bush has certainly cooled my casual email relationships with conservatives, including those at National Review. But unless we just want to talk to ourselves, it’s important that we figure out where in the “enemy camp” there’s an openness to actual give-and-take debate. (This was the subject of an open question posed by Markos on August 24, so it’s not just a “centrist” concern). And in my own experience, there are two kinds of Republicans, who cannot be sorted out by ideology: those who would be perfectly happy living in a one-party dictatorship (Karl Rove and most of the White House and RNC staff, Tom DeLay and most House Republicans, Rick Santorum, James Inhofe, Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, Ralph Reed, James Dobson, Bill O’Rielly, Britt Hume and much of the Fox News Staff, etc.) and those who would hate to live in a land with no debate or controversy.I’m reasonably sure the National Review folks–and for that matter, those at The Weekly Standard, with the possible exception of the once-reasonable Fred Barnes–fall into the latter category.Hell, National Review named Daniel Patrick Moynihan its Man of the Year in 1975–one year before he took away the Senate seat of William F. Buckley’s brother Jim.And while I’m not going to any dinners celebrating any right-wing publication or personage, I do have to say that engaging conservatives who are willing to engage honestly and on a relatively high plain (both conditions that must be insisted upon) is something progressives should welcome, not deplore.So: have the rules of engagement changed? Yes, but only so far as the Right has changed them. Where they haven’t, we should pick up our intellectual cudgels and have at it, and yes, express a little comity with those relatively few conservatives willing to play by those rules. Eating their food is no big scandal if it gives us the opportunity to eat their lunch.3) Has Joe Lieberman defected to the opposition? This question probably gets to the heart of The Moose’s complaint. He says some of our blogger buddies are engaged in a “McCarthyite attack” on Joe; I don’t agree. But I do think there’s a half-conscious effort to attempt a Zell Millerization of Joe Lieberman. To be clear, I personally am not the adoring Joe fan that I was five years ago; I have lots of issues with what’s he’s said and done since then, especially in terms of the Homeland Security debate, and his original and more recent postures on Iraq. But (and here comes a line I’ve been saving up for a while) I knew Zell Miller and worked with Zell Miller, and Senator Joe Lieberman is no Zell Miller, not by a very long shot. Lieberman votes with and sometimes leads Senate Democrats on a wide variety of issues. He was the loyal running mate of our 2000 candidate, and loyally supported our 2004 candidate. On some issues (e.g., heath care and tax reform), he was arguably the most progressive presidential candidate last year. Reading him out of the party, which a fair number of bloggers have talked about recently because they (sometimes erroneously) suspected him of heresy on this issue or that, makes no sense. If, as some have suggested, he’s too “conservative” to represent a blue state like Connecticut, then the Democratic voters of Connecticut have every opportunity to turn him out. Lieberman’s appearance at the Buckley/NR dinner, which everyone knows represents a personal bond going back to WFB’s endorsement of Joe in his first Senate campaign, is not that different from the decision by his Connecticut colleage, Chris Dodd, to vote against the party line for John Tower’s confirmation as Secretary of Defense back in 1989 (Tower had voted against a Senate censure of Dodd’s father). I don’t recall any big partisan recriminations towards Dodd for supporting a man whose credentials on civil rights and a lot of other subjects were arguably worse that Buckley’s, without all the mitigating circumstances I discussed earlier. It was personal, and everybody respected that. My bottom line is this: let’s all of us de-escalate this controversy, and use it to bring light, not heat, to the many questions it raises.

Michael Crowley over at &c. has drawn attention to a Jonathan Chait column in the L.A. Times this summer that I missed, about George W. Bush’s “creepy” obsession with the exercise habits of his staff. As Crowley points out, this obsession may have something to do with Bush’s close bond with Harriet Miers, who not only helped him clear brush down at the ranch, but has also gone running with her idol on occasion, matching him step for step. I realize that “working out” is something of a bipartisan obsession among young political folk in Washington. I’m constantly amused at twenty-something colleagues who care barely afford to rent a rabbit warren, and who live on reception food and dollar beer specials, but who invariably have expensive gym memberships. “You’re at an age where your body will forgive you anything,” I occasionally say to them. “Junk that monthly gym fee, and you could probably eat lunch more than twice a week, or take the big step up from 3.2 beer to Sierra Nevada.” But in Bush’s White House, the working-out thing seems to be a priority unlimited by age. And this must warm the well-exercised heart of Gary Aldrich, the former FBI agent who penned a tell-all book that focused on the devolution in body-shapes and overall personal grooming between the Bush 41 and Clinton White Houses (a theme similar to the paradise-lost maunderings of Linda Tripp, who also considered the Democratic invasion of the White House something of a Sack of Rome). When Aldrich’s book first appeared, I figured he was just a semi-fascistic outlier who cashed in on the bottomless right-wing appetite for anti-Clinton material. But there seems to be a pattern here: who cares if the White House “works” in Democratic administrations, and doesn’t in Republican administrations; the real question is whether it “works out.”Betcha “Brownie” was a real Spartan.

Last week a sequel appeared to one of the great classics of political analysis–Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck’s 1989 paper, The Politics of Evasion. The previous report was published by the Progressive Policy Institute; the latest, entitled The Politics of Polarization, by the folks over at the congressionally-focused group Third Way (which is friendly with the DLC, but is a completely independent organiztion). This is a 71-page report chock full of findings and recommendations, so my first suggestion is that you read the whole thing, and don’t rely on the Cliffs Notes version reported in the newspapers, or on the generally carping references to it in much of the blogosphere, based largely, I suspect, on the Cliffs Notes version. Yes, Galston and Kamarck argue that the real gold in American politics is in the ideological center, and they will annoy some of you who think counter-polarization is the key for Democrats. And yes, they claim that Democrats haven’t developed a credible consensus on national security issues, and that will annoy others of you who think a position favoring withdrawal from Iraq will do the trick (for the record, Galston and Kamarck both opposed the invasion of Iraq in the first place).But the real value of the paper is that it hammers home three fundamental realities of contemporary partisan politics that cannot much be denied: (1) the GOP-engineered polarization of the two parties along ideological lines has made Democrats much more dependent than Republicans on sizable margins among self-identified moderate and independent voters (and thus more vulnerable to base/swing conflicts) (2) George W. Bush’s 2004 win was produced as much by persuasion of a sizable minority of moderate voters (particularly married women and Catholics) as it was by mobilization of his conservative “base;” and (3) a changing issues landscape has reinforced the importance of Democratic efforts to deal with chronic negative perceptions by voters on national security and cultural issues–efforts which fell short in 2004.If that sounds familiar to regular readers, it’s because it’s pretty much the lesson the DLC took away from the 2004 elections.Galston and Kamarck place special emphasis on “candidate character” as a significant voting factor for “values voters,” and like many other post-election analysts, think John Kerry was fatally wounded by voter perceptions that he was on both sides of not one but two wars (Vietnam and Iraq). But they also make it clear that Kerry’s problem wasn’t simply inconsistency, but the suspicion that his “real” positions were out of line with mainstream sentiments. In other words, it’s not enough to avoid “flip-flopping;” attention must be paid to the political impact of choosing “flip” over “flop,” or vice-versa. This extremely simple point is one that a lot of Democrats, in an understandable mania for clarity and partisan differentiation, sometimes miss.If I have one criticism of The Politics of Polarization, it’s that it fails to say much about the Democratic opportunity to make enormous gains with “values voters” by drawing attention to the incredible and ever-growing pattern of ethical lapses and dissembling by Bush and the GOP.There is little question that Bush’s current dive in support, particularly from independents, is attributable in no small part to buyer’s remorse among voters who thought he was, if nothing else, a man of simple virtues and basic honesty (we tried to tell them otherwise in 2004, to little avail). And there’s little question the only way Democrats can be sure to benefit from this vulnerability is to support a reform agenda designed to help repair the damage the GOP is inflicting on our institutions and our national interests.Still, there’s plenty of great value in the Galston-Kamarck analysis, including a number of fascinating studies of changing perceptions of the two parties over time. One example: as late as 1986, six years into the “Reagan Revolution,” a comfortable plurality of voters considered Democrats rather than Republicans as the party of “traditional family values.”Like I said: read the whole thing.

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.