Reactions To The Reactions To Miers

I listen to Laura Ingraham in the morning on my way to work. On the way home, I listen to Hugh Hewitt. When it comes to the Miers nomination, it's a lot like having a little devil on one shoulder and a little angel on the other (no, I'm not going to say which radio host is which critter on my shoulder), and they keep contradicting each other.

"Oppose Miers. She's unqualified."

"Support Miers. She's got great experience."

In today's OpinionJournal, Peggy Noonan writes a brilliant assessment of where the two sides find the basis of their opposition or support, as well as what the nomination says about the President (Used with permission from OpinionJournal.com, a web site from Dow Jones & Company, Inc.).

[T]he Miers pick was another administration misstep. The president misread the field, the players, their mood and attitude. He called the play, they looked up from the huddle and balked. And debated. And dissed. Momentum was lost. The quarterback looked foolish.

The president would have been politically better served by what Pat Buchanan called a bench-clearing brawl. A fractious and sparring base would have come together arm in arm to fight for something all believe in: the beginning of the end of command-and-control liberalism on the U.S. Supreme Court. Senate Democrats, forced to confront a serious and principled conservative of known stature, would have damaged themselves in the fight. If in the end President Bush lost, he'd lose while advancing a cause that is right and doing serious damage to the other side. Then he could come back to win with the next nominee. And if he won he'd have won, rousing his base and reminding them why they're Republicans.

I agree. I wanted a fight--a fight over judicial philosophy and over control/obstruction of the Senate confirmation process. My disappointment is not so much over Harriet Miers and her qualifications or lack thereof, but over the lack of that fight.

Here's how Hugh characterized the issue, in part:

Let's be more specific. Conservatives, me included, want Ralph Neas, Nan Aron and the radical Democrats in the Senate humbled. They want the Democratic Party split over its remaining center-left Democrats and its left-fringe Democrats. Some of us want the courts to return to their proper role and remove themselves from the social engineering best displayed by the Massachusetts Supreme Court's declaration of imposition on the subject of same sex marriage, and SCOTUS' pronouncement that all the state legislatures in all of the states could never find a 17 year, 364 day old cop and child killer suitable for the death penalty.

In short, we have to win this battle, or all of the other battles --including the GWOT-- become imperiled if not lost.

The recriminations now being hurled at the White House are delighting the MSM and their friends on the left. There's a reason why the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are running huge stories on this fight, and it isn't because the fight is good for the conservative movement.

Part of my disappointment with the conservatives piling on the White House is the refusal to look at the entire political situation as it exists right now, 10 months into a 48 month term, 13 months before a crucial election, a week before the Iraq election and four years into a war that will go on for decades.

Bush and his team made a judgment on what was best for the cause of reforming the judiciary now, and he's been stalwart in that cause throughout. Judging his judges on the Miers nomination is lousy analysis, especially as the case isn't ripe. Talk to me in 2009 about the Bush judicial legacy. As of today, it looks extraordinarily good, but some conservatives seem intent on snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

This nomination is becoming a wedge splitting the solid wood of the Republican Party in two. If Miers were to withdraw her name this minute and allow President Bush to nominate one of the names on the well-publicized short list (Luttig, Jones, Owen, McConnell, etc), I'm not sure the GOP would have the heart to fight things out with the Democrats just yet. The infighting over Miers is starting to bloody the party, and looks like it's going to take time for the party to heal well enough to be back at fighting strength.

Ultimately--constitutionally--the decision of who to nominate to the Court is to be made by the President. Not by a majority of his party. Not by his base. Not by loyal attorneys who believe they know what the proper qualifications are. The decision is the President's alone. He has made it. Let that decision play itself out.