If Harriet Miers Doesn't Get Confirmed

During informal discussions in between sessions at last week's GodBlogCon, talk turned to President Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court. Some bloggers suggested that either the President would withdraw Miers' nomination or the nominee would pull out herself.

I have never stated an opinion about whether Miers should be confirmed or not. Nor will I. But as a student of politics, I had to tell the bloggers predicting her demise as a nominee for Associate Justice that I disagreed emphatically.

But now I'm not so sure. Today, I can imagine a withdrawal of her nomination.

If Harriet Miers doesn't get confirmed, it will be because a White House spooked by a series of missteps, perceived and real, and by decreases in presidential popularity, quickly forgot how to get a justice voted onto the Court.

The formula, as seen in the Roberts nomination, is simple: nominate a stealth candidate, insist on the candidate saying nothing about how she/he might vote on hypothetical cases, see the candidate perform credibly during Judiciary Committee hearings, and then, wait for the Senate to say, "Yes."

Using this simple plan, Miers, whose background is at least as strong as Sandra Day O'Connor's was when President Reagan nominated her for the Court back in 1981, would have won easy confirmation from a Republican Senate.

Had the White House diplomatically ignored the criticisms that came from some conservative pundits that the President had failed to make the right choice, all would have been well from W's standpoint.

Instead, the folks at 1600 let paranoia get the better of them. They started making calls and public statements designed to assuage their base. In direct contradiction of the formula and what they had successfully done with the Roberts nomination, the President and others began talking up Miers' evangelical Christianity and her past opposition to abortion.

What were they thinking?

No matter how riled up members of the President's base might have gotten, there was no way they were going to defeat Miers once her name came up for a vote.

Now, the President and White House have managed to insult the Religious Right, which feels that they should not be expected to support someone just because that person happens to be an evangelical Christian. So, the usually politically-adept White House has only extended the argument within the GOP over Miers.

In the meantime, by making such a big deal of Miers' past efforts regarding abortion, the White House has also heightened the chances that the Dems will invoke the "extraordinary circumstances" clause of the Gang of Fourteen's agreement, further imperiling the Miers' nomination by holding it hostage to the once-shrewdly-avoided filibuster.

At the very least, the poor manner with which the selling of Harriet Miers has been handled by the White House assures that this confirmation process is likely to be more contentious than the recently-concluded Robertson procedure was.

If the Bush Adminstration fails to get Miers onto the Court, the succeeding confirmation process could be the most bruising we have ever seen.

I still think that Miers' chances of being confirmed are better than even. But her odds shouldn't be so daunting. Even with the questions about her credentials, she could have been a slam dunk.