Rather than giving up his transparently silly comparison of Harriet Miers and Sonia Sotomayor, Ramesh Ponnuru decides to dig a bigger hole. Although he concedes so much ground that I'm not sure why he's bothering. (I concede the point: if you leave aside the many crucial ways in which the analogy is howlingly inapposite, it holds up much better!) Jason Zengerle neatly demolishes Ponnuru's attempt to compare Sotomayor's credentials with those of George Bush (call me crazy, but it's not clear that getting gentleman's Cs as a legacy admission to a non-meritocratic Yale is the precise equivalent of making law review at the country's best law school). Yglesias, meanwhile, notes that Sotomayor's credentials are rather more similar to those of Samuel Alito than to Miers. Ponnuru concludes by saying that Senate Republicans should feel free to disagree with even a highly credentialed nominee if they disagree on the merits, which is perfectly fair (if a rather different standard than most of his colleagues applied to Alito), but does less than nothing to justify the Miers analogy.
But to make a similar point to the one Adam makes in his terrific article, it's also worth addressing Ponnuru's assertion that Sotomayor is like Miers because "both nominees were picked because they were women, because they were members of politically valued groups (evangelicals in Miers's case, Hispanics in Sotomayor's), and because they were considered politically reliable by the people who picked them." If we take out the (unsubstantiated, implausible, and indeed offensive) assertion that Obama doesn't respect Sotomayor's intellect, why bring up Miers rather than much more relevant analogies? This description certainly applies to Saint Reagan's picks of not only O'Connor but Scalia, who was tapped over Bork in part because he was Italian-American. It also applies much more to Clarence Thomas -- who was obviously picked because even a Republican president didn't want a lily-white court, and replacing Thurgood Marshall with a white reactionary would hurt he GOP among moderates -- than to David Souter (whose pick appealed to no obvious Republican constituency).
Does Ponnuru think it's fair to analogize Scalia and Thomas to Miers? Does Ponnuru think that Souter was a better pick than Thomas? Or, preferably, can we just stop pretending to be shocked that politics plays a role in Supreme Court nominations no matter what party controls the White House?
--Scott Lemieux
