"How can George Will now stand against Miers?"
Because he wants a well-qualified conservative nominee for the Supreme Court???
What does "well-qualified" mean in Republican Land, anyway? After all, Republicans, generally speaking, have voted for the confirmation of plenty of "well-qualifed" "interpreters" of the Constitution.
They voted, generally speaking, for the confirmation of Ginsberg, didn't they? Yet no one questioned whether or not a postmodern ACLU lawyer was "qualified" to opine about the law. Nope. But they sure are now.
Fine. We all do. But "He who says 'A' must say 'B'." You can't confirm anyone we know to be "a well-qualified conservative nominee" without having a credible threat of the constitutional option.The bottom line is that Bush's judgement is that he has to play small ball. One thing to replace Rhenquist - but O'Connor for Luttig? No can do, with the squishy soft RINO middle of the Senate. Face it, some of our trouble in the Senate comes from Senator Reed (D) Nevada. Reelected last year in a red state. As well as RINOs in blue states. Bush doesn't want to become a lame duck by having his nominee rejected; Nixon and Reagan did lose nominees - and the results were Justices Blackmun and Kennedy.
Bush is on record that Clarence Thomas or Scalia are the gold standard. That means that when he is retired he wants more "Scalias" than P41 (or for that matter than RWR) had. And he doesn't know that he will have any more SCOTUS picks. This nomination is not a throwaway. IMHO