Qualifications

Sorry for being late on this one. It's been a busy couple of weeks, but I finally got back to work. This one is in today, so don't look to Tuesday. I should be back on schedule next week.

Qualifications
By Anthony Harris

I would like to write editorials for the New York Times. I have very little experience with journalism, especially expanding outside the Maroon Tiger, I don’t have my undergraduate degree in English, and I have much more growth to do as a writer. I don’t even know the Associated Press style of writing yet, but I feel that I’m completely qualified to write editorials for the paper of record to the United States.
My roommate would like to be a prosecutor for the state of New Jersey. He hasn’t completed his undergraduate degree in political science. He isn’t as much of a spatial thinker. He hasn’t even looked at the LSAT’s yet, let alone the bar exam. But I feel that he is completely capable of representing the state of Georgia in the very difficult adversarial nature of the courtrooms of New Jersey.
I have quite a few friends here at Morehouse and at other prestigious institutions like the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M, and MIT that all want to be engineers. These are all intelligent people that have very little experience in their prospective professions. They don’t have their degrees; they haven’t learned all their calculus and physics yet. But I feel that if all these people got together, I’m about fifty-five percent sure that they could construct a bridge that would not collapse under the overwhelming weight of a Geo Metro and a box of paperclips.
I know people from all sorts of venues that have certain qualifications for their futures, but they still aren’t experienced to take on high profile jobs. Yet, why does all this work for President Bush? Harriet Miers has no experience as a judge. She doesn’t even have as much experience with the law as other former Supreme Court Justices that had never been judges before their appointments. Justice Earl Warren, who wrote the majority opinion of Brown v. Board of Education, was the Attorney General of California and ran for Vice President under Thomas Dewey against Harry Truman in 1948. Late Chief Justice William Rehnquist was a law clerk under Supreme Court Justice Robert H Jackson from 1951 to 1952 and served as Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Council under President Nixon. These people had experience with the law as an overreaching force over policy and had some experience with constitutional law, which is the main criteria of the Supreme Court. Miers only has to her credit her experience as White House Council and her years of experience with President Bush, and her experience as the head of the State Bar of Texas. That’s impressive, but it’s no Attorney General. And it most certainly isn’t any experience on a bench. We aren’t in elementary school and you don’t count by saying “1, 2, skip a few, 99, a hundred!” There are steps that one must take to hold a position of this power, and Miers is not qualified to take this seat. President Bush should not have made this appointment. At least when President Bush ran for his present office, he spent four years as the governor of Texas. His record wasn’t so great, but at least it was on the résumé.
Now, the Senate has to make a decision on whether or not to approve a woman that no one really knows to make decisions that could change the nation's laws, and she has no track record. Her experience is mostly with business law, which has much to do with the trivial details of the Supreme Court according to Jonathan Glater’s recent article in the New York Times, but it still says nothing about major issues that change the American public. Harriet Miers should not receive this seat on the Supreme Court. She isn’t qualified, we don’t know her, and this nation is much larger than a Geo Metro and the Constitution is a little more rickety than a bridge constructed by undergrads.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Artistic Partnerships

To Be Young, Gifted, Black, and a Jazz Enthusiast: Apparent Needle in a Haystack

2022: I Lost My Father and Got Into Milton Nascimento