From Pat Buchanan:
Handed a once-in-a-generation opportunity to return the Supreme Court to constitutionalism, George W. Bush passed over a dozen of the finest jurists of his day – to name his personal lawyer.
In a decision deeply disheartening to those who invested such hopes in him, Bush may have tossed away his and our last chance to roll back the social revolution imposed upon us by our judicial dictatorship since the days of Earl Warren.
This is not to disparage Harriet Miers. From all accounts, she is a gracious lady who has spent decades in the law, and served ably as Bush's lawyer in Texas and, for a year, as White House counsel.
But her qualifications for the Supreme Court are nonexistent. She is not a brilliant jurist – indeed, has never been a judge. She is not a scholar of the law. Researchers are hard-pressed to dig up an opinion. She has not had a brilliant career in politics, the academy, the corporate world or the public forum. Were she not a friend of Bush, and female, she would never have even been considered.
What commended her to the White House, in the phrase of the hour, is that she "has no paper trail." So far as one can see, this is Harriet Miers' principal qualification for the U.S. Supreme Court.
What is depressing here is not what the nomination tells us of her, but what it tells us of the president who appointed her. For in selecting her, Bush capitulated to the diversity-mongers, used a critical Supreme Court seat to reward a crony and revealed that he lacks the desire to engage the Senate in fierce combat to carry out his now-suspect commitment to remake the court in the image of Scalia and Thomas. In picking her, Bush ran from a fight. The conservative movement has been had – and not for the first time by a president by the name of Bush.
