John Hinderaker, of the widely-read conservative blog Powerline, offers this refreshingly honest approach to the Miers nomination:

aul’s post below started me thinking about Miers’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee and how she should respond to the inevitable questions about whether assurances have been given to conservative constituencies on her view of Roe v. Wade. It occurs to me that there may be a simple approach by which both Miers and President Bush can be extricated from the present difficulty.

Suppose Miers testifies to the following: 1) She believes Roe was wrongly decided, and has expressed that view from time to time in conversation. 2) Her disagreement with Roe is not based on her opposition to abortion, but rather on her opposition to judicial usurpation. The Constitution says nothing about abortion, and the idea that the Court suddenly “discovered” the right after nearly 200 years is ridiculous. 3) She doesn’t know whether she would vote to overturn Roe, because that would depend on issues relating to stare decisis that she hasn’t yet analyzed, and she would not make that kind of decision without hearing the case before her, studying the authorities and the arguments of the parties, and discussing the issues with her colleagues on the Court.

Mightn’t that approach solve a number of problems?

The only drawback to this suggestion is that absolutely no one - and I am sure this includes Hinderaker - believes a word of this bullshit. Indeed, unless Hinderaker is privy to personal conversations Miers has had that nobody else knows about or has reported, he has no basis at all for suggesting that Miers has ever said or thought any of the things above. His only cited justifications for this suggested course are his calculations as to its political efficacy - nowhere does he even hint that he has evidence that this laughable bushwa is actually true. He’s making it up - and doesn’t even pretend not to be making it up.

In other words, Hinderaker is quite openly laying out a carefully planned series of perjuries which he advocates Miers use to “solve a number of problems” in her nomination hearings. He then goes on to describe those problems exclusively in terms of the politics of the nomination and the opportunity to score points off the Democratic party. Perjury is of course a small thing to weigh in the balance against rewards such as those.

But it’s worth noting that an influential conservative voice is openly advocating testimony that no one could possibly believe, and which is clearly not grounded on fact, as an acceptable tactic for a (Republican) Supreme Court nominee. That’s enlightening, though hardly surprising.

HealthLawProf Blog notes that some Amish families in a small Minnesota community are torn over whether to have their children vaccinated against polio. Quoting an AP story, he reports that 4 children from among only about 2 dozen families have come down with polio (none apparently is a serious case); they include 3 siblings from one unvaccinated family and an infant from another, and “state doctors expect more cases to turn up”. The other families now have to decide what to do.

HealthLawProf states that: “the community is divided over the proper reponse - vaccine or trust in God.”

Perhaps they are, but it seems to me that the question has been answered for them. The traditional Christian faith-healing position is that God wants people to rely on him and rewards their faith by curing their illnesses when they do so; to turn to medicine shows a lack of faith in God, but abstaining from technological medicine demonstrates faith and will invoke God’s protection. In that case, then, these Amish have conducted their own “natural experiment” to test their belief as to God’s preferences, and it has failed.

They didn’t get vaccinated. They did get polio. God’s obviously trying to tell them something. What do they want, a burning bush?