You are correct about the political environment in the senate. Snowe, Collins, Chaffee, Specter, Voinovitch, Warner and others are liberals. McCain, Lott and Hagel are trouble makers. Your above comment about who is responsible for this mess is right on target. It's the voters who elect these RINO's and Democrats in the senate who are responsible.
So-called conservative commentators like Goerge Will, Robert Bork, Ann Coulter and Mark Levin can easily forget about that factor when complaining about why we didn't get the Utopian pick. I'll give credit to both Thomas Sowell and Rush Limbaugh and a few others who have mentioned the political environment the president faces when he makes his nominations.
All of that said, what you didn't mention is that it will still come down to the hearings and what Miers says. Either she'll show to be a strict constructionist -- an originalist -- or she won't.
If she is a strict constructionist, then we have won and we would not have settled. If she is not, then we have lost, and lost badly.
And BTW, a comment for conservative commentators like Will, Levin, Coulter and Bork: It is the laws of this country that are complicated -- it is the principles of the Constitution that are easy. Not being from a clicky Ivy League school or some Northeast think-tank is not a demerit. It's a positive. And grass root conservatives can easily come to that conclusion minus the elitist conservative talking-heads who risk becoming -- like the elitist Democrat talking heads we have long despised -- OUT OF TOUCH!
AMEN.
Ping!