James Taranto's article on Harriet Miers is fairly devastating . He suggests that she would not be subject to liberal salon DC conversion over time — but has already been there, done that. She has a history of being very comfortable playing with the other side. It is hard to see her as being the kind of person who could persude anybody to move to her side (assuming that she is solidly on the conservative side).

She seems like she has always been the one who tries to get along. Add to that what appears to be a fairly vacuous paper trail from 1992 and 1993 in Texas , and the idea of her acting as a persuader on the Court (with "movables" like Kennedy or Breyer) seems fairly remote.

When the President apparently decided that his pick to replace O'Conner would be better received if the nominee were a woman, he immediately cut off well over half the possible candidates. By then looking for a nominee with a very thin paper trail (the gold standard since the failed Bork nomination), the pool shrank much more.  

Caving into the idea of a "woman's seat" on the Court, and to nominees with scant public records, is hardly the best way to work this process. The GOP has 55 seats in the Senate, and the 7 Democratic Senators who agreed to the compromise on filbusters, were unlikely to filbuster a Bush nominee to the Supreme Court. Bush and the GOP were in control of this process, regardless of the blustering of Ted Kennedy or Chuck Schumer or Dick Durbin.

Somehow, this nomination feels like a surrender, a battle avoided, which has not been the President's record in other areas. 

Richard Baehr   10 14 05