Whether or not a good case can be made for Miers is only of transient concern, good for a couple months of lengthy threads on FR.
Whether or not Miers is a solid vote on the Court for the Constitution will be of serious impact for decades.
The past record shows that we all, including some of the brightest pundits amongst us, have poor track records at predicting the force that a Judge will become.
I ask that Bush pick someone that he knows, as certainly as he can know, will be a force for the proper rule of the law and courts, as described in the Constitution.
I could give a 'rats patooie (sp?) whether it is someone I have ever heard of or can make any case for or against.
This is Bush's call, and I have no way yet to know if he got it right or now. I can do nothing but watch and wait, and quit posting to these silly threads <grin>.
I can see enough of Miers to believe it is possible that Bush got it right. Only if I were certain that Miers was a leftist, another Ginsberg incarnate, would I be at the fence of the White House, pitch fork in hand.
I found this interesting...
A post from the The Volokh Conspiracy blog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volokh_Conspiracy)
http://volokh.com/posts/1129306241.shtml
Putting the Size Six Shoe on the Other Foot:
I’ve seen a lot of silly theories put forth by liberal bloggers and commentators about why the “conservative elite” opposes the Miers nomination. So let’s put the shoe on the other foot.
How would the “liberal elite” have reacted if, instead of nominating Ginsburg or Breyer, Clinton, after promising to nominate Justices in the mode of Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, had nominated a managing partner in the (Little Rock-based) Rose Law firm who had donated to George Bush’s 1980 presidential campaign (as Miers donated to Al Gore’s 1988 campaign); was Clinton’s personal lawyer; was a big muckety-much in the pro-free market Chamber of Commerce (analogous to Miers and the ABA); had publicly opposed affirmative action (as Miers has publicly supported it); had denounced the ACLU(as Miers has more or less denounced the Federalist Society); whose supporters could come up with no better rationale for her appointment than that she was a female Unitarian who had privately expressed the view that abortion should be legal; and who otherwise had analogous credentials and background to Ms. Miers, except with the opposite ideological tinge?
My hypothesis is that such a nominee would have run into at least as much opposition from liberals as Miers has faced from conservatives, and that even fewer liberals would have bought Clinton’s “trust me” line than conservatives have bought this line from Bush.
[David Bernstein, October 14, 2005 at 12:10pm]
I've seen more rational arguments analyzing Brown's decisions in court cases which call into question how "strictly constructionist" she would be in some areas (or maybe more accurately, how she would tend to rule against the administration in the area of war powers, and might grant too many rights for some conservatives).
This isn't hard since we have no cases to review for Miers. But it is wrong to suggest that Brown was the "perfect" candidate. Some who were happy to have her where she had to follow precedent didn't trust her where she could do what she wanted.
I'm not in a position to agree or disagree with them. But every pick is a matter of trusting someone.