The Wrong Edith

Rumour mills claim that at 9PM EDT time today, President Bush will nominate the relatively unknown Edith Brown Clement to the Supreme Court. My last hopes that this was all false guessing was vanished when I read that a clerk at her office answered a question by saying "We've been told the only thing we are allowed to say is that she is away."

I wish the President would not appoint Brown. The only thing we know about this woman is that she is uncontroversial (which is often code-word for liberal.) Oh.. and we know that she is against overturning Roe. She has stated that the Supreme Court 'has clearly held that the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution includes the right to have an abortion' and that 'the law is settled in that regard.'"

I don't see the political points being scored here. (She is from the South, but it's not like the GOP has problems winning votes in the South.) I do see the possibility of another ideological disaster like Kennedy though. And most importantly, we already know that she will be on the wrong side of the abortion debate.

This President had a chance to turn this court from 6-3 (pro abortion) to 5-4 (still pro abortion.) It's a shame he has chosen to not take this step.

UPDATE:

Ramesh Ponnuru thinks I'm wrong:

[Clement's comments] shouldn't inspire fears among pro-lifers--which, judging from some of the blog commentaries and emails I've been reading, they are. That is precisely the stance that an appeals-court judge has to take, and it says nothing about how that judge would rule if she were on the Supreme Court. Indeed, if an appeals-court nominee didn't say something like that before the Senate, she wouldn't get confirmed. So for pro-lifers to demand that Supreme Court nominees never have made such statements is self-defeating: It means that almost everyone on the bench would have to be wiped off the list of Supreme Court hopefuls. No anti-Roe justice would be able to rise through the ranks.

I say that he may be right, but all I can think of is all these supposedly conservative justices appointed by Republican Presidents who have turned out to be worse that the liberals appointed by Clinton.