What Miers taught us

Back in September, when President Bush was considering nominees to fill the vacancy on the Supreme Court, I have to admit I was in favor of Harriet Miers. Another woman on the bench would send the right message and encourage young women to seek posts in public service. But now I am seriously rethinking just how important having a woman is.

In high school government class, we learned that, in general, women, urban-dwellers and highly educated people, among other demographic categories, tend to have liberal opinions and vote for Democratic candidates. In Miers' case, those criteria struck out, and she withdrew her nomination for the Supreme Court yesterday. Despite being a woman with a J.D. from Dallas, Miers was not, from what anyone can gather, anything approaching a typical liberal. Angela Merkel, soon to be Germany's first female chancellor, is also a conservative. Neither of these women fits the simplistic civics model.

But do people favor women in public service because they expect that they will hold liberal opinions? Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, whose slot Miers would have filled, was certainly not a liberal. Yet you would be hard-pressed to find someone who considers her a poor justice. She did her job well, whether you agree with her decisions personally or not. If neither political ideology nor gender is essential, what is the necessary element that distinguishes people in public service?

It is important that people in public life reflect, at least to an extent, the makeup of the society they serve. I certainly don't want to live in a society completely controlled by male WASPs over the age of 40. I doubt their ability to serve the American people as a whole effectively. But I am equally opposed to the other extreme. Mandating some form of artificial diversity would be equally ineffective.

Lebanon, for example, uses religion as a criterion for posts in its government; a certain position can only be filled by a Christian, another by a Sunni Muslim and yet another by a Shiite. Whatever effect this may have to ease tensions in Lebanon, it is not appropriate in the United States. Even a simple quota system, like that of the European Parliament, where half the candidates need to be women, doesn't really address the issue, and it certainly doesn't mean that half the members of parliament are women.

What's really important is not whether a candidate is a man or a woman, or black or white, but if he or she is qualified and can fill the post effectively. And there is a real issue here.

Positions of power have historically been filled by white men because white men had the easiest access to power, through education and networks. If we want our public servants to be women, or African Americans, or anything else, we need to make sure that the most important criterion to succeed is merit.

And it is exactly that merit that Miers was lacking in her nomination for the Supreme Court. She had done nothing to earn the nomination other than being a faithful ally of the president. Additionally, I had serious doubts as to whether she would be able to fill the post competently. I'm afraid she would not have been able to separate her personal religious beliefs from the professional duty of a Supreme Court justice to interpret the Constitution.

Just as there are effective and ineffective male public figures, there are female ones also. Condoleezza Rice is qualified for her current position as secretary of state, just as she was to be national security adviser. Edith Cresson, France's first, and only, female prime minister, under Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, was an absolute disaster and left under a cloud of scandal.

This leads to another important point. Qualifications and merit have nothing to do with one's ideological stripe, but with one's capacity to fill the post. It doesn't matter what side of the aisle you sit on; what matters is that you do your job well.

So while I'd love to see the Supreme Court full of female faces, not to mention the House, the Senate and even the presidency, I'd prefer, above all, to have every branch of our government filled with competent people.

Edith Mulhern is a senior French, international relations and history majorfrom Ardmore, Pa. Voice of the Sparrow appears on Fridays.

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