Category ►►► Mathematics

October 14, 2005

New Reason to Support Harriet Miers

Hatched by Dafydd

I have been pretty much supportive all along, based solely on the grounds that I think it would be bad for the party if she were slammed out of bounds before she even got a hearing. Then I became more strongly attracted to the notion that we really ought always to have at least one justice who isn't a former judge and isn't an "expert" on the Constitution: "convictions make convicts," as Timothy Leary used to say (I mean when he was alive), and experts who spend all their lives studying the writings of other experts in their subject tend to have a very subjective view indeed.

Bush believes Miers is Reaganesque in the sense of having an innate grasp of right and wrong in many circumstances, and I've seen nothing so far from her opponents that persuades me to the contrary. Examples of trivial mistakes or instances of stepping carefully through a landmine are no more persuasive than are the few mistakes Reagan himself made -- such as yanking our "peacekeeping" troops out of Lebanon directly after the Beirut massacre.

But I have just come across evidence that I haven't seen anywhere else... and this now puts me unabashedly in her corner. I now truly hope she will be confirmed.

Major Disclaimer!

I neither confirm nor deny that Patterico at Patterico's Pontifications may or may not have ever blogged on this subject, nor in the case that he has, do I either agree or disagree or even know what he may have said, in the event that he may have said anything about this at all. I am only an egg. I am Sgt. Schultz.

With that out of the way, we may proceed.

I was just reading the Wikipedia biography of Miss Miers, and I came across the following datum that absolutely clinched the decision for me:

Miers graduated from Southern Methodist University with a bachelor's degree in mathematics (1967) and from its law school with a Juris Doctor degree (1970) .

I suspect we have never had a Supreme Court Justice who actually passed classes in differential equations, possibly even partial differential equations -- and five of you reading this know how amazing that would be! -- group theory, Galois Theory, functional analysis, dynamical systems, and probably even mathematical logic. Imagine a justice who understood how to tell a convergent from a divergent infinite series, how to do a LaPlace Transform, and what Fourier Analysis is for! Or even just a justice who is comfortable thinking in N-space.

Harriet Miers has my full and unstinting support (I was about to say unqualified support, but that is too ambiguous).

Yay, team!

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, October 14, 2005, at the time of 5:41 PM | Comments (26) | TrackBack