"This nomination is far, far too important to gamble with, and that is what we are being asked to do."
I assume you voted for GWB. You didn't know for sure how true he would be to your values, but you trusted him to do the right job at the right time. It's time now to trust him and believe that he has done his job with this nomination. He has known Miers and had her work for years, why should he cave to a bunch of weak kneed people?
This is the Supreme Court "swing" vote we are talking about. It's the next 20 or 30 years. Yu get a bad President, he's out in four years and no matter how bad, you know he is better than the Dem alternative. You get a bad justice, you are stuck--for a long time.
I think Bush is the one being weak kneed here. If he were truly a man of his word he would have nominated the type of justice he said he would, a strict constructionist in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. He had a number of qualified candidates with and without judicial experience to choose from who met this criteria.
Instead he tried to get cute and play it safe by picking a candidate with a very thin resume professionally and not much of paper trail in terms of writings on constitutional issues. I see no evidence that she's even read the constitution much less ponderd it as the foundation of our legal system.
I worked very hard on election day to help the President. I spent over 15 hours working as a presiding judge in a largely Democratic precinct in the State of Ohio. I was there at ground zero in this election to make sure that, at least in my little corner of Ohio, the President got a fair shake. My reward for that effort is that I'm called a sexist or an elitist and told to "shut up?"
I trusted him with my vote. That does not mean I give up my right to question him, or tell him that he is going over a cliff. Frankly, it appears that the POTUS went a little wobbly in making this nomination.