Scalia is brilliant...ooh, but so divisive!
The fact of the matter is that you are not going to change the minds of someone who's spent the better part of his or her life constructing an elaborate perspective-with regard to interpretation of Constitutional, common and case law-to reflect your opinion more closely, no matter what polemical skills you possess.
The Supreme Court is not a forensics society, where the erudition or incisive reasoning of one member entitles him or her to more authority than the vapidity of another.
If this were the case, then Antonin Scalia's opinion would carry twenty times more weight-at the very least-than that of the doltish Stephen Breyer.
Unfortunately, that's not the reality we're presented with.
We should-and I believe that we have-convince the American public of the rightness of our views, but the only way of enacting them on a national level is by replacing-not convincing-Supreme Court justices with intractable anti or extra-constitional bents.
In any case, the idea that Miers-through either her blandness or collegiality-will persuade the Court's other members to move in the direction of Scalia or Thomas-presuming of course that she is even on their side in the first place-has not been born out by history.
Case in point, the dreadful tenure of Justice Burger.
Who, apparently, she calls her favorite Justice. Very telling. Burger was amiable but bland, not necessarily the brightest bulb on the Court, who despite personally believing in a strict interpretation of the Constitution was unable the move the Court in that direction and didn't even really try. History repeats?
I realize I keep hawking Alex Kozinski here, but it's instructive to compare him with Burger. Despite sitting on the Ninth Circuit, Kozinski isn't content to sit back and vote in the minority and sulk. Instead, he writes blistering dissents, full of the plainest of sense and logic. In one case, in fact, his dissent in a ruling that upheld a criminal conviction was so scathing and so straightforward, the government despite winning the appeal dropped the charges against the defendant. It's been called the Greatest Dissent. Now that's lawyering. That's the kind of man who can influence not only whatever Court he sits on, but public opinion as well. That's the kind of man we need on the Supreme Court. Not some amiable but bland nobody.