Max Sawicky is endorsing Harriet Miers for SCOTUS. I'm inches from following him. Unknown, untested, unqualified though she may be, any situation where Bush is nominating and conservatives are scrutinizing is one where certainty is our vicious enemy. With a conservative majority in the Senate, anyone Bush nominates who's got a hint of definition to them will have to appeal much more to Tom Coburn than Dick Durbin. And despite liberal fantasies of heroic crusades and unstoppable filibusters, we've neither power nor pull here, we detonate the nuclear option and the only ones who blow up will be ourselves.
Think this through for a sec. Let's say, best of all possible worlds, that we filibuster, Frist squeezes the trigger, Reid shuts down the Senate, and public opinion stays with us. Bush, sighing, announces that Miers has withdrawn her name from consideration. Yippee! He's listened to the cries for experience and academic brilliance and will name in her stead the widely-respected legal scholar Michael McConnell.
We gonna take him out too?
Betcha we won't. Because we can't. Bush has an unlimited number of wingnuts to draw from and we have a very limited public tolerance for filibusters to rely on. We can do it once, but probably not twice, and if twice, definitely not thrice. So we're really stuck.
With Miers, her lack of definition, the obvious primacy of her flattery of Bush rather than his knowledge of her ideology, and her past history of surprisingly liberal statements on a variety of important issues makes her the best hope we've got for a second Souter. And even if she is unqualified, unable to punch at the intellectual weight of the Court, that may yet prove a blessing as the mostly-liberal legal community could help her evolve left. As angels on her shoulder, they'll have to vie with Scalia's demonic whispering on the other arm, but if we can't win an argument with Antonin, we deserve to lose anyway.
So am I endorsing her? Nope. But I'm pleased with the pick. At a moment when conservatives could jam our worst fears through the confirmation process, that Bush's nominee is giving them the shakes is far more than I ever hoped for.
