Terry McMahon's Awesome Blog

Understand that I'm not convinced we can know what a SCOTUS justice is going to do until they're on the court, so I mostly love this nomination for the boatloads of political intrigue. All the following stories are individually fascinating, and they're only going to develop in the next few weeks.

1. Conservatives are wicked pissed. The RedState.org summary says flatly, "Harriet Miers is unqualified for the position," and David Frum at the National Review has this fantastic opening:

   I believe I was the first to float the name of Harriet Miers, White House counsel, as a possible Supreme Court. Today her name is all over the news. I have to confess that at the time, I was mostly joking.

   None of that is necessarily false, or even out of the range of conservative thought. What's surprising is that the wheels have come off the once well-oiled conservative message machine. Seriously, does anyone remember the political climate in early 2003? Could you imagine conservatives teeing off on a Bush Supreme Court nominee the day she got nominated? What the hell?

   UPDATE: I actually just found this: "There is now talk of among some conservatives about a filibuster of the Miers nomination." Oh wow.
   

2. The cronyism is outstanding. Miers is the first non-judge to be nominated to the Supreme Court since Rehnquist in 1971, and, as you probably know, her main qualification is being Bush's current personal lawyer. The idea of this president actually giving someone a job for which they're not qualified is pretty shocking, I know, but this pick in light of Brownie, the Tom DeLay-Jack Abramoff fountain of free golfing trips and lobbyist connections, and whatever the hell Karl Rove and Cheney's chief of staff were really doing about Valerie Plame, makes the corruption argument harder for Democrats to screw up by the day.
   
3. Harry Reid specifically requested Miers for the nomination. Seriously, on a blogger conference call last week, Reid related his conversation with Cheney in which he said, "I think that rather than looking at the people your lawyer’s recommending, pick her.” Regardless of whether or not that was a smooth move, how are Democrats going to oppose a broadly unqualified nominee when their own leader announces on the first day of her nomination that it was his idea? The upcoming developments within the Democratic Party on Miers should be fascinating.
   
4. Is she even conservative? Personally, I don't think it's a big deal that she donated to Gore in 1988 and Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas (Dukakis' running mate!) around the same time; pretty much all Texans were still Democrats then. But check out this nugget from the New Republic:
   

   For instance, she apparently submitted the following report to the ABA's House of Delegates. Here are two of the report's recommendations:

   • Supports the enactment of laws and public policy which provide that sexual orientation shall not be a bar to adoption when the adoption is determined to be in the best interest of the child. ...

   • Recommends the development and establishment of an International Criminal Court.

   
   Wow. She is, apparently, hugely pro-life (remember Roe?) but she also voted for a property tax increase whilst on the Dallas City Council, so apparently she once exhibited some independent thought. Maybe she's not that bad for us after all.
   
5. More from National Review: "She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met." Handsome, too. And while President Bush certainly is the smartest man in America, will this just convince everyone she's an idiot? Last night David Letterman did "Top Ten Signs Your Supreme Court Pick Isn't Qualified." That's gotta hurt.

I'll leave you with this awesome impression from some anonymous White House official, with a shout to Wonkette:

She's a nit-picky micromanager who failed upwards at the White House: "She failed in Card's office for two reasons," the [former White House] 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."