Rhetorical Outbursts

My reaction to the Miers nomination appears to be progressing through the five stages of grief. First, there was denial quickly followed by anger. Has Bush lost his mind? Is he really back on the sauce? She was the Staff Secretary. She served on the city counsel and the lottery commission. She’s worked with Meals on Wheels. This is not the resume of a Supreme Court Justice. As a caller to Laura Ingraham put it, “My wife has worked for meals on wheels too.” Great, let’s nominate her!

Then comes the bargaining. Well, maybe Bush has some Machiavellian plan to withdraw her nomination after a bitter fight and then put up a real nominee. Problem is, it doesn’t look like the Democrats are going to put up a fight. They’re snickering to themselves about what a chicken Bush is. He promised us someone in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. He won. He has a 55 seat majority in the Senate. Why nominate Miers? The real question is whether conservatives will have the guts to put up a fight.

Now there’s just depression, not quite acceptance yet.

David Frum links to a prenomination article expressing surprise that she was even tapped for White House Counsel:

She has also earned a reputation as exacting, detail-oriented, and meticulous — to a fault, her critics say. “She can’t separate the forest from the trees,” says one former White House staffer.

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Her critics say the problem goes beyond what Miers does or doesn’t know about policy — and right back to a near-obsession with detail and process. “There’s a stalemate there,” says one person familiar with the chief of staff’s office. “The process can’t move forward because you have to get every conceivable piece of background before you can move onto the next level. People are talking about a focus on process that is so intense it gets in the way of substance.”

One former White House official familiar with both the counsel’s office and Miers is more blunt. “She failed in Card’s office for two reasons,” the official says. “First, because she can’t make a decision, and second, because she can’t delegate, she can’t let anything go. And having failed for those two reasons, they move her to be the counsel for the president, which requires exactly those two talents.”

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Even people who know her well note that she is extremely private, good at eliciting opinions from others, but not generally revealing of her own.

More from Frum:

John Yoo’s piece is very carefully phrased. Indeed, given the heavy hints that the administration has been throwing out recently, it must have taken strong courage for this man who is himself eminently qualified for an appellate judgeship, to have gone even as far as he did. But listen:

“[A]ccording to press reports, she did not win a reputation as a forceful conservative on issues such as the administration’s position on stem cell research or affirmative action.”

Yoo is referring here to the case of Grutter v. Bollinger, a challenge to the constitutionality of preferential treatment for minorities in education. Many in the administration wanted to take a strong stand in favor of color-blindness. In the end, the administration faltered and argued that racial preferences are okay, up to a point. It is hard to imagine a more central issue to modern legal conservatives. Where was Miers? On the wrong side.

Inside the White House, Miers was best known, not as a conservative, not as a legal thinker, but as a petty bureaucrat.

These are not good qualities for a Supreme Court nominee. It’s fine to have a non-ivy league nominee. It just dandy to have a non-judge nominee. However, it needs to be someone who has demonstrated the ability and willingness to argue forcefully for an originalist jurisprudence. Miers simply hasn’t done so.