Hello rvoitier, I hope you don't mind me adding my bullet points to yours, though I think we're almost speaking the same truths here:
- Bush ran from the fight,
- he ran from his prior public announcements,
- he surrendered an entire decade in the future culture wars and burdened the cohort of Young Republicans with taking up the fight,
- he inexplicably wasted a 55 Senate seat majority, AND made it much harder for Republicans to maintain that majority, if the even deserve such political fortunes
- he has encouraged current Justices to remain on until his term ends
- he selected a woman because she's a woman,
- he nominated to the Supreme Court a lawyer who made him his fortune in the litigation and sale of the Texas Rangers, stinking of cronyism, giving a nod to the trial lawyers, and reinforcing his tacit support of the Kelso decision
- he gave Sen. Reid a stronger position in deciding his nomination than the public voices of his voter base,
- he denied his base the core promise he made to them,
- he has revealed he used switch and bait tactics mouthed through his media pontificators when the WH through them demanded us to suck it up and "compromise" during debates over RX plans, immigration reform, Campaign Finance Reform, the absence of a veto pen to stop the outrageous bloating of the Federal budget and Appropriations Bills, CAFTA, and others by using the promise of Supreme Court Justices as the payoff for all of the sacrifices,
- he used the payoff of a Conservative Constructionist Supreme Court as a bludgeon to stifle all dissenting debate within the party and the Republican/conservative/libertarian national debate, proving right those who were labeled too far to the right by our common political adversaries on the other side of the aisle
The WH just gave a huge phallic hand gesture to everyone to the political right of Arlen Specter.
On the other side, there are valid arguments too, including being a private industry lawyer, and a Beltway outsider. And she is a Texan. She was a senior partner in a lawfirm that is a rainmaker in Texas.
Dozens of jurists and lawyers with documented backgrounds who are a decade younger were passed over. Dozens, it's a very bad thought that there are hundreds of conservative lawyers and law professors in this country who could name more than a dozen better qualified and younger potential nominees than the one the WH has selected. As a young Republican who will one day see the battle to fill the seat Miers will vacate, I cringe at the idea of a Bush family crony positioning her way into the USSC through representing the President in the deal of his life through a dubious mess that was the Texas Rangers imminent domain and public funding sagas, at the expense of the grandchildren of today's conservatives who elected Bush to the WH twice.
