As with Justice Roberts, I think I’ll probably leave most of the talking about Harriet Miers to the folks over at Supreme Court Watch. But a few thoughts to kick things off.
First, not being a judge, in itself, doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. Many law profs who get nominated to the bench have never been judges. And more relevant to this case, there’s been a reasonably broad bipartisan call in recent years to get ‘a politician’ on the Court. And the whole point, in that case, is that the person not come from the bench or even be too deeply entrenched in the legal profession. Finally, as we’ve seen, pretty often it turns out that these nominees have only been circuit court judges for maybe a year or two prior to their appointment. And in the grand scheme of things, that amounts to little more than a bit of batting practice before going up to the plate.
The key that this nomination should and, I suspect, will turn on is that the she fits the Bush administration mold — she’s a loyalist through and through. The lack of any other clear qualifications for the job becomes clear in that context.
The Post says this morning …
Miers came with him to the White House in 2001 as staff secretary, the person who screens all the documents that cross the president’s desk. She was promoted to deputy chief of staff before Bush named her counsel after his reelection in November. She replaced Alberto R. Gonzales, another longtime Bush confidant, who was elevated to attorney general.
Matt Yglesias finds this quote from David Frum …
In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.
Sounds like a keeper, don’t she?
Presumably she’s been involved in some fashion or another in everything the White House has been involved in over five years and intimately involved in every legal decision in 2005.
Game on.
