Just call her Cassandra Coulter
Here’s Ann Coulter, writing in 2005:
…[W]e don’t know much about John Roberts. Stealth nominees have never turned out to be a pleasant surprise for conservatives. Never. Not ever…
[L]et’s ponder the fact that Roberts has gone through 50 years on this planet without ever saying anything controversial. That’s just unnatural…
It’s especially unnatural for someone who is smart, and there’s no question but that Roberts is smart.
If a smart and accomplished person goes this long without expressing an opinion, they’d better be pursuing the Miss America title.
Apparently, Roberts decided early on that he wanted to be on the Supreme Court and that the way to do that was not to express a personal opinion on anything to anybody ever. It’s as if he is from some space alien sleeper cell. Maybe the space aliens are trying to help us, but I wish we knew that…
Maybe Roberts will contravene the sordid history of “stealth nominees” and be the Scalia or Thomas Bush promised us when he was asking for our votes. Or maybe he won’t. The Supreme Court shouldn’t be a game of Russian roulette.
The title of the column is “Souter in Roberts’ Clothing.”
It’s rather like Saruman joining Mordor.
Full marks to Coulter.
I sure would like to know why liberals on the Court don’t have these conversion experiences. It’s getting demoralizing.
I don’t remember any more the order in which GWB’s SCOTUS nominations went down, but I do recall being outraged at the elitist vitriol that went out from Coulter and a number of others when W put Harriet Miers’s name in. I quit several of the blogs I had read every day for years, notably Powerline and Bainbridge, and have seldom, if ever, gone back.
Was Miers qualified? The din was so loud and so unpleasant (particularly considering the nonstop barrage of sh*t W was getting from the Left and the media) that I don’t think we ever got the chance to find out.
Would Coulter have liked a Miers better than a Roberts after all? We’ll never know.
Elizabeth L. Crain: I was one of Miers’ defenders. Not that I thought she was especially qualified—I don’t think she was—but that the objections to her and and the critiques of her qualifications were way out of proportion.
My major posts on the subject can be found here and here.
Thank you for the links, Neo. In re-reading them I am reminded how gory a feeding frenzy it truly was, and — or so it seemed to me at the time — how unexpected and surprising in its virulence. Miers was hardly “treated with respect” or “praised for her accomplishments,” as Stuart Taylor wrote in the Atlantic article you quoted at length. From where I stood it seemed that something primal had been triggered. To this day I still don’t understand it.
Your comment, and the links, also reminded me why you are one of the bloggers I did *not* stop reading in 2005. Though I seldom comment, I check in with you all six days of the week that you write, and I appreciate your perspective as a counselor in the psych field and as a “changer.”
Meirs was treated the same way Palin was. Yes, primal hatred for anyone who dares not toe the liberal line. Still happening and will continue. IMO
“I sure would like to know why liberals on the Court don’t have these conversion experiences.”
The most recent left-to-right conversion on the SCOTUS I can think of goes all the way back to Felix Frankfurter, who was appointed by FDR during the New Deal but ended up on the conservative side during the Warren Court. The last significant opinion he wrote was the dissent from Baker v. Carr where the court mandated reapportionment of state legislatures.