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I am more upset about the trolls that keep popping up on this website. I believe she will make everyone eat their words. As I said to my husband -- I'm 66 yo and honestly believe I and many other so-called nobodies would be great Justices. All you have to do is read and learn the constitution and follow the law.

All you have to do is read and learn the constitution and follow the law.

By the time you can do that and do it competently, quickly, persuasively, and consistently within a huge body of established precedent while hewing to often arcane judicial rules you are, by practice and definition, a lawyer.

I think Ann's measure of mediocrity starts above where most of us consider a really high point in achievement. Harriet Miers has risen far beyond the achievement of most Americans as relates to the halls of power. Ann's assessment of her reflects her own lack of knowledge and experience of workaday Americans as well as an attitude of downright elitest east coast snobbery. President Bush said today that Miers would not legislate from the bench. Isn't that what all of the conservatives have said they wanted in a Supreme Court Justice? I hope Harriet Miers makes it thru the process because I think she is more rooted in fundamentals that concern this country than are her detractors.

"honestly believe I and many other so-called nobodies would be great Justices"

I always loved Wm. F. Buckley's remark that he would rather be ruled by "the first 1000 names from the Boston phone book" than by the Harvard faculty..... :^)

I agree that any decent literate US citizen with solid conservative values would make a better SCOTUS justice than the liberals we've seen on the court, BUT I do think sophisticated constitutional learning and argument is essential to waging and winning the "culture war" within the legal profession. That's where someone like Luttig could have a huge impact, but our PC-nation seemed to require that Bush pass over male candidates on this pick. If a justice does not write* legal opinions that carry weight in the profession and get cited by judges, law professors, etc. then his/her influence will be much more limited (though having one of 9 votes in a closely divided court is nothing to be dismissed).

*[It's become well known that the clerks play a large, sometimes, dominant role in writing opinions for the busy justices, but the best justices still do control the language and content of their SCOTUS opinions.]

Anyway, fwiw, I'm cautiously hopeful about Miers.... I think there were better candidates out there, but I do think she'll be quite good and a lot better than the liberal riff-raff who have dominated the court for 40+ years...... I'm just not sure we'll see her opinions treated as weighty by the legal profession, but then even Scalia (who is universally acknowledged as brilliant) is treated more with amusement than respect by most of the leftist legal culture......