Will On Miers

The new George Will column on Bush's pick for SCOTUS is up....and it's a humdinger.

A few words of my own on this Miers pick:

I normally don't like to jump into the fray when it comes to topics which are covered by-and-large by the mass media or countless other blogs. There are plenty of opinions, well thought- out and not-s0-well-thought-out out there, and I often feel that adding my opinion into the public discourse on widely covered issues is the equivalent of spitting into the ocean: it has no impact on the sea level one way or another. That said, I've been supremely disappointed with Bush's judgement on this one. It reflects a lazy mindset, perhaps a weary one. Bush has been under a great deal of strain from the beginning of his presidency to now. I shed no tears for him on this note, mind, as that is the nature of the office. (Kennedy, a year into his own presidency, once exclaimed in private to one of his staff, "I hate this sh*t! You want my position? You can have it!) But the wear of the last five plus years has revealed itself with this pick. Simply, I think Bush is a mentally exhausted man at the moment.

I'm going to go on record with this Miers pick and say that I think that she'll be withdrawn. I don't think she has the intellectual firepower, a la John Roberts, to withstand Senate scrutiny. Bush can beat the liberals, but he can't beat them without the conversatives behind him. Liberals are only semi-partial to Miers because conservatives hate her (and rightly so). But in this instance, the "enemy of my enemy is my friend" strategy might wind up being a Pyhrric one for the Dems. If she gets on the bench, everyone loses. It is not merely enough for me as a conservative to have someone say, "I'm against Roe v. Wade". I want someone who can successfully argue, based on profound constitutional reasoning, why they think it is unconstitutional. To paraphrase George Will's statement in the above linked article, to say that the ruling is wrong without the proper legal philosophical reasoning is as bad as the ruling itself, which arrived at a different ruling based on the same shoddy thought pattern.