I just like saying "phlogiston"

/ 14 Comments

Well, Steinn has already taken my idea of constructing an entire blog post from this quote from Michael Bérubé, but I’ve decided I’m not too proud to do it anyway. (Andrew Jaffe actually has some things to say.)

Now, the last time I got together with my editor, on a weekday evening in a midtown restaurant in New York, he flagged the opening pages of the chapter on my postmodernism seminar and said, you might want to watch the mention of Kuhn—because, as you know, there are any number of readers out there who are really tired of humanities professors citing Kuhn and getting him wrong. Likewise with Gödel and Heisenberg on “incompleteness” and “uncertainty.”

As you might imagine, this remark made me violently angry. Yanking the bottle of pinot grigio from the ice bucket to my right, I smashed it on the edge of the table, stood up, and said, “All right, man. I know all about those readers. And I’m as pissed off about sloppy appropriations of Kuhn as anyone. But let me say one thing.” At this point I had drawn the alarmed attention of all the diners-and-drinkers in the place, not least because I was waving the broken bottle around and making random stabbing motions. “I’ll put my reading of Kuhn up against anyone’s. Anyone’s, do you hear me? DO YOU HEAR ME? I’m serious, man—I don’t just go on about ‘paradigm’ this and ‘incommensurability’ that, people. I can take Kuhn’s examples about phlogiston and X-rays and shit, and I can extrapolate them to Charles Messier’s late-eighteenth century catalog of stellar objects, or the early controversy over the determination of the Hubble constant, or the 1965 discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Penzias and Wilson. GET IT? So don’t mess with my goddamn reading of Kuhn. Any of you.”

There were a few moments of silence, punctuated only by some nervous clattering of silverware. Then a conservatively-dressed man in his early fifties got up from a table fifteen or twenty feet away. “People like you,” he said, trying to stare me down, “read Kuhn backwards by means of Feyerabend’s Against Method, and as a result, you make him out to be some kind of Age of Aquarius irrationalist who thinks that scientists run from paradigm to paradigm for no damn reason.” Then he tossed his napkin across the table. “And if you want to deny it, I suggest we step outside.”

In my experience, it’s scientists who get The Structure of Scientific Revolutions wrong more than humanists (or at least as much). Both of them lazily envision Kuhn as a screaming relativist; the difference is that scientists do so with disdain, while humanists do so with approval. Although he wasn’t really very clear about it, Kuhn wasn’t a relativist of any sort; he thought that scientific progress was very real. It’s just not clean and algorithmic, at least during those moments of “revolutionary” science when two very different sets of ideas seem equally plausible. The good news is, the dust always settles, and one paradigm doesn’t overthrow another paradigm just because the new paradigm’s supporters take the old paradigm’s supporters out back and beat them up. Ultimately Nature makes it clear that one idea is just better than another, and all but a few lonely cranks hop on the bandwagon. It’s guessing which bandwagon to hop on in the early stages that is the real fun.

I just like saying "phlogiston" Read More »

14 Comments

Escape from the clutches of the dark sector?

/ 25 Comments

Dark matter and dark energy make up 95% of the universe — or at least, we think so. Since these components are “dark,” we infer their existence only from their gravitational influences. Some of us have been foolhardy enough to imagine that these observations signal a breakdown of gravity as described by general relativity, rather than new stuff out there in the universe; but so far, the smart money is still on the existence of a dark sector that we have not yet directly detected.

There remains another possibility worth considering — that there is no dark stuff, and that gravity is perfectly well described by general relativity, but that we just aren’t using GR correctly. In other words, that the conventional theory can explain the observations perfectly well without dark matter or dark energy, we just have to be clever enough to figure out how. This would be the most radically conservative approach to the problem, in John Wheeler’s sense: we should push the smallest number of assumptions as far as they can possibly go.

Recently, separate attempts have been made to explain away “dark matter” and “dark energy” by this kind of strategy. In a paper that somehow got mentioned in the CERN Courier and on Slashdot, authors Cooperstock and Tieu have suggested that nonlinear effects in GR could explain flat rotation curves in spiral galaxies (one of the historically important pieces of evidence for dark matter). And in two papers, Kolb, Matarrese, Notari and Riotto and then just Kolb, Matarrese, and Riotto have suggested that nonlinear effects in GR could explain the acceleration of the universe (a key piece of evidence for dark energy). Are these people making sense? Are they crazy? Is this worth thinking about? Have they actually explained away the entire dark sector? (Answers: occasionally, possibly, yes, no.)

In both cases, the relevant technical issue is perturbation theory, specifically in the context of general relativity. Imagine that we have some equation (in particular, Einstein’s equation for the curvature of spacetime), and we’d like to solve it, but it’s just too complicated. But it could be that physically interesting solutions are somehow “close to” certain very special solutions that we can find exactly. That’s when perturbation theory is useful.

Call the solution we are looking for f(x), the special solution we know f0(x), and the small parameter that tells us how close we are to the special solution ε. For example, gravity is weak, so in GR the small paramter ε is typically something proportional to Newton’s constant G. Then for a wide variety of situations, the sought-after solution can be written as the special solution plus a series of corrections:

f(x) = f0(x) + ε f1(x) + ε2 f2(x) + …

So there are a series of functions that come into the answer, each of which is accompanied by a progressively larger power of ε. By only knowing the first one to start, we can often plug that solution into the equation we are trying to solve, and get an equation for the next function fi(x) that is much simpler than the full equation we are struggling to solve.

The point, of course, is that we don’t really need to get the whole infinite series of contributions. Since ε is by hypothesis small, every time we raise it to a higher power we get smaller and smaller numbers. Often you do more than well enough by just “going to first order” — calculating the εf1(x) term and forgetting about the rest. But it’s certainly possible to get into trouble — for example, there could be “non-perturbative effects” that this procedure simply can’t capture, or the perturbation series itself could be sick, for example if the function f2(x) were so huge itself that it overwhelmed the extra factor of ε it comes along with. We would then say that perturbation theory was breaking down.

…

Escape from the clutches of the dark sector?Read More »

Escape from the clutches of the dark sector? Read More »

25 Comments

Questions sought

/ 6 Comments

Bob Park, author of the irreverent What’s New weekly newsletter from the American Physical Society, is soliciting suggestions for questions to ask Harriet Miers about her views on science.

1. SUPREME IRONY: SHOULD NOMINEES BE QUESTIONED ABOUT SCIENCE?

After nominating Harriet Miers for a seat on the Supreme Court, President Bush sought to reassure religious conservatives by stressing Miers’ evangelical Christian roots. Bush said it’s part of who she is. He’s right, but traditionally the personal religious views of nominees are not taken up in the confirmation process. If the First Amendment is upheld, it shouldn’t matter. So forget religion. Far more important in the Twenty-First Century is the nominee’s views on science. There are, after all, few cases that come before the courts today that do not have a scientific component. Scientists must construct a list of basic questions that would give some insight into the nominee’s views on science. For example: do all physical events result from earlier physical events, or can they be caused by clasping your hands, bowing your head, and wishing? Send your suggestions to What’s New. WN will print the best of them.

Suggestions can be sent to whatsnew@bobpark.org, although you’re welcome to leave them in the comments here as well.

In other news at the intersection of religion and politics, Eugene Volokh clears up a question that I know has been bugging me for quite some time. (Prompted by an actual complaint!)

For those curious about whether [a public high-school marching band] playing The Devil Went Down to Georgia would be an Establishment Clause violation, the answer is no; though some songs that mention God (or for that matter the Devil) may in some contexts be seen by a reasonable person as endorsements of religion, this song wouldn’t be.

I think it’s true that the Charlie Daniels song couldn’t reasonably be taken as an endorsement of Satanism. Because, you know, the Devil gets his ass kicked in that song. (Devil’s advocate here.)

Questions sought Read More »

6 Comments

Infrared Andromeda

/ 5 Comments

NASA’s infrared Spitzer satellite has released these gorgeous new images of the Andromeda galaxy. In infrared, you are directly observing the dust lanes that describe the galactic arms, rather than simply looking at reflected starlight.

Andromeda galaxy

Here’s a bigger version. Lyman Spitzer, after whom the telescope is named, was one of the primary movers behind the original Space Telescope idea, which eventually grew into the Hubble Space Telescope. He was also my grand-advisor: George Field was my Ph.D. advisor, and Spitzer was his.

Infrared Andromeda Read More »

5 Comments

The long bomb

/ 10 Comments

Here at Cosmic Variance we’re all about the football/physics crossovers. But even we have our limits.

These limits have been emphatically violated by Gregg Easterbrook, commenting at NFL.com about the weekend in football and gamma-ray bursts. Easterbrook doesn’t even attempt to actually tie his occasional science musings into the subject matter of his football columns; he just sticks them in there because nobody would ever read anything he wrote about science by itself. (Well, pot, kettle, okay.) His unfortunate track record along these lines includes weird statements about cosmology, particle physics, and extra dimensions.

gamma-ray burst Now he’s on about gamma-ray bursts. These are mysterious events that don’t last very long (minutes down to milliseconds) but are very bright, much brighter than supernovae. Astronomers have recently put together a convincing story about short-duration bursts: they arise from the collisions of two neutron stars with each other.

This story was assembled from such old-fashioned techniques as making observations with actual telescopes, and comparing to the predictions of theoretical models that involve equations and all that. None of which is necessary in the great Easterbrookian scheme of things. He has a better idea: that gamma-ray bursts are “the emission lines of horrific weapons being used by civilizations that have acquired fantastic knowledge compared to us, but no additional wisdom.” Aliens blowing themselves up! Of course, NFL.com is a publication aimed at the general public, so Easterbrook wasn’t able to show us his calculation of how the spectrum and time-series data from the Swift satellite and ground-based followups are better fit by the suicidal-aliens hypothesis. But I’m sure he’ll be submitting his findings to the Astrophysical Journal any day now.

Thanks to Kriston for the pointer.

The long bomb Read More »

10 Comments

Scientists look for dinosaurs, dig up humans instead

/ 5 Comments

Last year I was fortunate enough to join the folks at Project Exploration on an honest-to-God dinosaur expedition, digging up fossils in Wyoming. PE is a great organization, headed by educator Gabrielle Lyon and paleontologist Paul Sereno, that works to get kids interested in science. I wasn’t able to make it to Wyoming this year (I was enjoying croissants in Paris, as I recall), but I wanted to point to PE’s latest project: a set of field updates on the web about a recent expedition to Niger.

Sereno has led several expeditions to Niger to search for fossils, coming back with such discoveries as an astonishing skeleton of SuperCroc (or Sarcosuchus Imperator, for you sticklers out there). During the 2000 expedition, the team stumbled across a remarkable find: remains of a Neolithic human settlement, perhaps 5,000 years old, with about 200 human skeletons in addition to countless artifacts of various sorts. Not being really equipped to take advantage of the find, the team protected the fossils as well as they could, with the idea of teaming up with archeologists and coming back later to excavate the site.

Paul Sereno and Shureice Kornegay

That return trip was just recently undertaken, and one of the team members was Shureice Kornegay, a graduate of PE’s Junior Paleontologist program who is now attending Norther Illinois University. Shureice and Paul have been writing these field updates that convey some of the excitement and challenge of such a major undertaking as this expedition. It’s great to read along as they cope with tipping water trucks and insect swarms of “biblical proportions.”

Some details about the expedition can be found in this communication to the team (pdf), which will fill you in both on the background of the site, and on what you need to bring with you when you’re about to head out to the Sahara to dig for bones! It’s good to be occasionally reminded that physics isn’t the only exciting science out there.

Scientists look for dinosaurs, dig up humans instead Read More »

5 Comments

It's not the blog

/ 24 Comments

Nobody has ever accused me of being shy about talking to journalists. Not that I’m any sort of attention hound, mind you; I just consider it part of my civic duty to explain science blah blah blah. But in the last couple of days I’ve been fielding phone calls about a somewhat stickier topic.

Last week Daniel Drezner found out that he was denied tenure. For those of you who don’t know (and shame on you), Dan is a political scientist who has an informative and entertaining blog about international relations, monetary policy, things like that. He is also at the University of Chicago. The connection is that I have an informative and entertaining blog (yes, I mean this one, although at the time it was my previous one), and I am also at the University of Chicago, and I was also denied tenure. (Indeed, Dan has ruined one of my claims to fame, being the source of the only Google hit for “blogger denied tenure.”) Two points, as you know, determine a line, and there’s been a lot of conclusion-jumping going on: bloggers can’t get tenure, the UofC is biased against bloggers, etc. Stories have appeared in Inside Higher Ed as well as the New York Sun.

Blaming the UofC is just silly; anyone who thinks that there is some philosophical connection between the physics and political science departments doesn’t know how academia works very well. The blogging question is more interesting. I don’t have any real interest in hashing out the details of my own tenure case, but there’s a legitimate question for younger academics about whether or not blogging is a bad idea for your career. (We’ll put aside the obvious point that blogging under your own name and saying insulting things about your senior colleagues, or providing graphic details of your sex life, might be a bad idea, to concentrate on more academically-themed blogging.)

There’s a short answer and a long answer. The short answer is “No, it’s not blogging that prevents you from getting tenure; it’s because some people in your department (or the dean, or whatever) didn’t think that your research was good enough.” The blog was not a hot topic of discussion in my case, and I’m pretty sure that many of my colleagues don’t even know what a blog is, much less have a negative opinion of mine.

The longer answer must deal with the issue of why someone doesn’t think your research was good enough. (You might wonder whether teaching and various other forms of service are also relevant; at a top-tier research university like Chicago, the answer is simply “no,” and if anyone says differently they’re not being honest.) I think my own research was both solid and influential, and Dan’s looks pretty good from the perspective of a complete outsider; certainly neither of us had simply sat around for six years. But these are judgment calls, and a lot goes into that judgment. Like it or not, if you are very visibly spending a great deal of time doing things other than research, people might begin to wonder how devoted you are to the enterprise. To first order it doesn’t really matter whether that time is spent blogging or playing the banjo; some folks will think that you could have been spending that time doing research. (At second order it does matter; some people, smaller in number but undoubtedly there, feel resentful and jealous when one of their colleagues attains a certain public profile on the basis of outreach rather than research.) Of course nobody will ever say that they voted against giving tenure to someone because that person spent too much time on public outreach, or put too much effort into their teaching. But getting a reputation at being really good at that stuff could in principle make it harder to have your research accomplishments recognized — or not. It’s just impossible to tell, without access to powerful mind-reading rays that one can train on the brains of the senior faculty.

Blogging may very well be a contributor to this image of not being perfectly devoted — although, given the lack of familiarity with blogs on the part of most senior faculty, it’s very unlikely to be playing a major role. But even then it’s not blogging per se, it’s the decision to make an effort to communicate with the public. Blogging is just a technology, not a fundamentally new activity. It’s part of connecting to a wider audience, in ways that can be either serious or frivolous. Also, blogging may very well have a positive effect. It gets your name out there, and we can’t completely ignore the fact that some people (even senior faculty) really do appreciate the attempt to bring wider recognition to your academic discipline. It’s probably a wash, overall, although the positive or negative aspects could be important in certain individual cases.

Of course, it goes without saying that I personally think that connecting to a wider audience is an integral part of being a professor, not just a diverting sidelight. I don’t think that each individual academic must spend a lot of time on it (there are certain professors I would just as soon keep away from the public), but the field as a whole needs to take it seriously. Blogging is in an early stage of development, but it’s becoming a powerful tool indeed. As Michael Berube says, eventually the radical newness of blogging will evolve into familiarity. Then having a blog will be exactly as deleterious or advantagous to one’s career prospects as appearing on TV or writing op-eds for the New York Times — no more, no less. Some will embrace it with enthusiasm, and some will look down their noses at it. Hopefully, we embracers will march cheerfully forward, and use the new technology to make some sort of real difference.

It's not the blog Read More »

24 Comments

The world is not magic

/ 42 Comments

Here is a true story. Saturday, after the symposium at Fermilab, I was driving back into the city. To be honest, I was completely exhausted; it had been a long day of talks, and I had been up quite late the previous night throwing mine together, resulting in very little sleep. So I was pretty much ready to crash, certainly uninterested in any sort of activity involving serious brain function.

And then I remembered that the big football game was about to start — my beloved Penn State Nittany Lions vs. the Ohio State Buckeyes in a titanic battle for Big Ten supremacy. Sadly, however, I don’t have cable TV at my place (long story). But I knew how to circumvent this obstacle: a visit to ESPN SportsZone, the modern sports-bar/video arcade that features comfy leather recliners in which you can grab a bite while you watch the game on their huge-screen TV. A perfect brain-free activity to cap off the evening. Very un-physics-professor-like behavior, but I’ve done worse. And if all went well, Penn State would even win, preserving their unbeaten record and vaulting them into the national-championship picture.

(Aside: they did win, outlasting 6th-ranked OSU for a rain-soaked 17-10 victory in front of 100,000 screaming Penn State partisans. An incredibly important victory for the program and for legendary coach Joe Paterno, who had inexplicably suffered through four losing seasons in the last five years. Paterno has been head coach for 40 years, including 20 bowl victories (best ever), 349 total victories (second-best), five undefeated seasons, and two national championships. He’s also donated millions of dollars to the university — to build a library. When Penn State joined the Big Ten a dozen years ago, Paterno was 66 and widely expected to soon retire. When Barry Alvarez steps down from the head job at Wisconsin at the end of this year, every school in the conference will have experienced a head-coaching change — except Penn State. Due to the travesty by which college football chooses its national champion, it will be difficult for PSU to get a legitimate shot at the title this year even if they win all their games. But if things break just right, the Lions could be headed to the Rose Bowl on January 4th to duke it out with USC for the big enchilada. Watch out, Clifford, we’re coming for you!)

So there I am, enjoying my buffalo wings and Guinness and cringing as Ohio State scores the first field goal. At the table next to me was a group of women who were visiting the big city for the weekend, celebrating the birthday of Caroline, one of their number. They were also Ohio State fans — no accounting for taste. It’s perfectly clear within the restaurant who is rooting for which team, just from the timing of shouts of delight or groans of dismay, so we were soon trading good-natured barbs about the relative merits of our respective squads.

By halftime Penn State was up 14-10, so I was feeling especially magnanimous. We chatted about what we all did for a living and so forth, and I ended up explaining something about dark energy and particle physics and the big bang. Caroline, after making a good-faith effort to understand the distinction between quarks and leptons, pleasantly but firmly demanded to know “What is the practical use of all this? What can we actually do with it? Why is it worth spending time on it?”

My line on these questions is that there isn’t necessarily any practical application (although there may be spinoffs); we do it as part of a quest to understand how the world works. I was trying to explain this, with less than complete success. But then Caroline’s younger sister (whose name I unfortunately forget, as I would love to give her credit), who was a secondary-school science teacher before she had kids of her own, leaned across the table and said “Because the world is not magic. This is what I always taught my kids, and it’s what everyone should understand.”

The world is not magic. The world follows patterns, obeys unbreakable rules. We never reach a point, in exploring our universe, where we reach an ineffable mystery and must give up on rational explanation; our world is comprehensible, it makes sense. I can’t imagine saying it better. There is no way of proving once and for all that the world is not magic; all we can do is point to an extraordinarily long and impressive list of formerly-mysterious things that we were ultimately able to make sense of. There’s every reason to believe that this streak of successes will continue, and no reason to believe it will end. If everyone understood this, the world would be a better place.

Of course, there are different connotations to the word “magical.” One refers to inscrutable mystery, but another refers simply to a feeling of wonder or delight. And our world is full of that kind of magic. I get to listen to some fascinating talks on neutrinos and particle accelerators during the day, enjoy a statement-making victory over our conference rivals in the evening, and be handed a nugget of marvelously distilled wisdom from a woman in a sports bar who I had never met and will unlikely ever see again (a Buckeye fan, no less) — these are all magical. We shouldn’t feel disappointed that the march of understanding removes an element of mystery from the world; we should be appreciative of how much there is to know and the endless variety of ways in which our sensible universe continues to surprise us. The very fact that our world is comprehensible should fill us with wonder and delight. The world is not magic — and that’s the most magical thing about it.

The world is not magic Read More »

42 Comments

Einstein speaks

/ 13 Comments

Einstein Yesterday I gave a talk at a Fermilab symposium celebrating the World Year of Physics. It was a great event, aimed mostly at local high-school students and the public more generally, although personally I learned alot from the other talks myself.

My own talk was an overview of special and general relativity; you can see the slides here (warning: large pdf file). Eventually I think all the talks will be in video on the symposium web page. I played an audio file featuring Einstein himself explaining the basics of that equation E = mc2 that we were talking about a while back. People were asking me where I stole it from, so here’s the answer: an Einstein exhibit at the American Institute of Physics website. Give it a click; it’s nice to hear the master himself talk about his formula, thick German accent and all.

Einstein speaks Read More »

13 Comments

Competence and politics

/ 20 Comments

Harriet Miers, it appears, has definitively confirmed the initial impression of someone who is utterly unqualified for the position of Supreme Court Justice. As far as I have heard, she has never even argued a case before the Court, or perhaps even stepped inside the building. She was nominated because she is a trusted friend of George W. Bush who will vote to protect him and his policies over the next decade or so. Other than that, and some hints from her history of political donations and which church she attends, she’s pretty much a cipher.

Nobody outside the White House is happy with this nomination. Conservatives are upset that they weren’t given an overtly ideological nominee with a well-articulated judicial philosophy (either social-conservative or laissez-faire libertarian, depending on one’s personal tilt). But liberals are really in a pickle. On the one hand, there’s no reason to think that Miers is anything other than a knee-jerk social conservative and protector of ulimited executive power. On the other, she isn’t an outspoken slouching-towards-Gomorrah conservative activist who will disguise an extended attack against civil liberties as a high-minded intellectual stance. And if Miers is not confirmed, the next nominee is quite likely to be such a person — and we can be confident that it won’t be anyone who will loudly affirm their support for Roe v. Wade during the confirmation hearings. So liberals are presented with an interesting philosophical question: given that it’s very unlikely we will be happy with the actual votes of any of Bush’s nominees to the Court, which is preferable, a competent conservative or an incompetent one? (Conservatives, of course, are in a different but equally interesting pickle.)

Cass Sunstein alludes to this issue on the new University of Chicago Law School blog:

We might distinguish between two grounds for evaluating Supreme Court nominees. The first is technocratic. Is the nominee excellent? Does the nominee have relevant knowledge and experience? The second ground is political. How is the nominee likely to vote? How does the nominee approach the Constitution?

As I’m sure Sunstein recognizes, that gloss of “excellent” is a little too glib. What does “excellent” really mean? Or even better, what good is excellence? Extraordinary competence in the service of bad ends is no virtue. For those of us who are likely to disagree with the political stance of a conservative Justice, we have to wonder who will do more damage: a technocratically excellent conservative, or a non-excellent one?

Roberts was, in my view, not worth opposing. He was experienced and competent without being the fire-breathing reactionary that many of the alternatives were. Ironically, the best articulation of the reasons to support Roberts were given by Barack Obama, who ended up voting against him. We have to pick our battles, and recognize that losing elections limits what can be accomplished. I don’t see any reason to believe that a subsequent nominee from the Bush administration would be any less objectionable than Roberts, who at least is not laughably unqualified.

But Miers is. And ultimately, for me, that’s the deciding point; liberals have to oppose Miers, simply on the basis of her complete lack of qualifications for the job. Mark Schmitt gets to the heart of the matter:

I realized last night that all this is too much double-thinking. The one and only thing to remember about Miers is that she is totally unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court. It’s not a particular thing, like that she went to second-string law school or has never been a judge or never argued a case at the federal appelate level. Nor is it that she’s been disbarred or fell asleep in court or stole money from escrow accounts. (None of which are true, as far as I know.) It’s that there’s nothing there. Take away the George W. Bush-loyal-staffer aspect of her resume, and there’s absolutely nothing except some modest corporate law-firm and bar-association management, skills that are of no relevance to the Court.

(See also Belle Waring and Kieran Healy. Scott Lemieux wavers, but ultimately comes down on the other side. Thank goodness for the blogosphere; in the old mainstream-media days it would have been nearly impossible for non-experts to get such nuanced commentary so quickly and accessibly.)

There are two very good reasons to value competence, even in someone of a disagreeable ideological cast. The first is a basic respect for the instution. It’s the Supreme Court we’re talking about here, not a sinecure for loyal cronies like the Federal Emergency Management Agency! We have to think beyond this particular nomination, into the much longer term. Precedents matter, in the actions of Congress and the President as well as for the courts, and we can’t allow it to become accepted practice to appoint unqualified personal friends to the Supreme Court. Ultimately, nobody wins if that becomes the standard.

But the second reason is just as important, if not more so: there’s no reason to think that, just because a certain conservative is less of a great legal mind, that they can’t end up doing far worse damage in the long run than an intellectually powerful ideologue. Miers is not an ideologue, she is a hack. Her loyalty is not to a philosophical system, it’s to George W. Bush. And that could be a disaster. She could end up not only sanguinely voting to overturn abortion rights and other privacy protections, but to systematically protect the executive branch from any form of judicial oversight. We don’t want someone on the Court who will cheerfully scuttle the Constitution in order to uphold the government’s right to torture people and to hold citizens in indefinite detention without legal recourse.

If Miers is rejected by the Senate, the next nominee will certainly be someone quite unpalatable to liberal sensibilities. But at least it could be someone who knows their way around the Constitution. And that should be a minimum standard for serving on the highest court in the land.

Competence and politics Read More »

20 Comments
Scroll to Top