A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

I like Captain Ed, but this--with all due respect--is absurd:

The only way that Miers doesn't get confirmed, therefore, is if the GOP decides to derail the nomination -- and I would urge people not to push that option. First and foremost, I do trust Bush to nominate someone who will at least vote correctly once on the Court. We really didn't have much more on which to rely for Roberts; the difference between the two was the remarkable experience and scholarship that Roberts had gave him so much more credibility than his critics. Bush knows Miers very well, even if we don't, and I'm certain that he wouldn't pick a Souter. (Incidentally, that's also why I didn't think Gonzalez would be another Souter; I just think he has too much political baggage to be an effictive nominee.)

We have expressed our disappointment in clear and factual terms. Unlike the Julie Myers nomination to ICE, that should satisfy us, absent any disqualifying revelations in the next few weeks. If Bush knows his counsel well enough, we will have avoided a bloody battle and won most of the war. Let us continue to insist that future nominees to all posts demonstrate a level of excellence that makes all of us proud to support, instead of a level of proximity that leaves us all scratching our heads.

UPDATE: A clarification:

No, this does not mean that we let up on the Senate. In my opinion, the lack of leadership in the Senate made this choice possible, although given the odd nature of some of Bush's recent nominees -- like Myers -- it might have happened anyway. It doesn't mean we let up on Bush and his instinct to pick nominees from his close circle of friends. We need to insist on excellence, especially for lifetime appointments.

But at the same time, we have to be realistic. The choice has already been made. I don't want to inflict unnecessary political wounds now, especially at a critical juncture with the Iraq elections and Iranian nuclear proliferation on the foreign-policy table. Pulling Miers off the table for even a Maureen Mahoney, who would have been a much more remarkable "cipher" candidate, would trigger the war that we could have fought on much better terms had Miers never been nominated at all. It would have been worth fighting under the right political conditions, but now would make Bush look like a puppet to the "radical right" and play into the hands of the Exempt Media.

Bush blew it, but Miers may still surprise us, so let's not compound the mistake.

Let's get through the Iraqi parliamentary elections and focus on conservative, fiscally responsible, and excellence-supporting candidates in 2006. The next stage will be to create a new fundraising machine that will challenge the GOP to match its rhetoric with concrete actions; perhaps we will take Not One Dime More or some other mechanism in that direction next year...

Eh, quoi? Since when are we supposed to give the President a pass merely because he has a lot of things on his plate? We praised the Roberts nomination--the good Captain included--precisely because the president nominated a brilliant jurist and lawyer with sound and respectable principles. Now we are supposed to shrug the nomination of a competent but hardly exceptional lawyer simply because we have foreign policy challenges? Tell me when this isn't true. Tell me when we have a period of peace and calm in just about every policy issue under the sun so that we really can go to the mattresses in agitating for a quality nominee to the United States Supreme Court.

The only good thing about the Miers nomination is that it is not subject to a filibuster. Filibusters--as the deal with the "Gang of 14" made clear--are supposed to be initiated only on "extraordinary circumstances." And there is nothing whatsoever extraordinary about Harriet Miers. Crashing through glass ceilings is impressive. But the Supreme Court demands more than that.