Hearings. And that's what Meirs needed.
Hearings where the only evidence of a judicially-conservative philosophy (for the sake of argument, I'm assuming that it does exist), her work for Bush and in the White House, would necessarily not have come out. To the extent that this recent late-life conversion to conservatism would have come out, the support among the RATs who saw her as a like-for-like replacement for O'Connor would have dried up faster than any support among the few conservative Senate Pubbies would have formed.