Good for you. I bow before your blinding light.
Speaking of which, I see the wonderfulness of your legal education is reflected in this statement: "A much stronger argument can be made that the Miers' supporters were anti-intellectual than that the anti-Miers' folks were elitist."
Anti-intellectual? Good Lord, but the whole anti-Miers argument was centered on her supposed lack of an intellect and lack of an intellectually grounded judicial "philosophy." It was and remains dishonest. What the anti-Miers people want is someone with a public record that is demonstrably hard Right. They want someone on the court who will not only vote what they consider to be the right way, but who can articulate their arguments in written opinions.
That's fine. It's what the political process is all about. What I can't abide is the lie that Ms. Miers was not qualified when the Constitution, itself, is silent on the matter of judicial qualifications, and when many former SCOTUS justices had comparable resumes to Ms. Miers.
"They want someone on the court who will not only vote what they consider to be the right way, but who can articulate their arguments in written opinions."
Not this conservative. What I want in a nominee is a conservative intellectual force that leads the court (and the legal system) to a more sane understanding of the proper role of the courts in our society. As I've said before on other threads, I'd rather have a brilliant jurist who gives me 70% of the votes I want than a mediocrity who votes "correctly" all the time. The White House's only argument the past few weeks has been that Miers would vote correctly (and they offered no evidence to support that contention). I feel fairly confident that the political commentators who led the charge against Harriet feel the same way.