Man, that's such a lame, trite argument. Try to follow this train of thought based firmly in our Constitutional form of government:
The President is free to nominate whomever he wishes for posts that require Senate advice and consent.The Senate is free to vote as it sees fit on any nomination.
The people are free to weigh in on any nomination using the wide array of means available to them in the early 21st Century: emails, phone calls, text messages, snail mail, walk-ins to district offices, call-ins to talk radio, blogging and posting on political forums, participation in associations and groups that lobby congress, and so on.
When the collective weight of the senate's and the people's feedback act to defeat a nomination, either before or in a senate vote, that's just an instance of how our system is supposed to work. We would have a problem only if a President did NOT listen to the will of the people, or if the people are too indifferent to make their opinions known. President Bush and Harriet Miers did listen. She withdrew and he nominated a wonderful candidate in now-Justice Alito. And yet people like you keep whining about what might have been but never was.
Actually, it’s not lame, and I’m not whining about anything. I’m simply saying that W is not going to get any kudos from me for both judges.
He was well aware beforehand what the people expected and desired from him as regards judicial nominations. He knew very well one reason many of us voted for him was to, in his Constitutional duties as President, nominate constructionist jurists to the court. It was not, in any way shape or form, a surprise to him that we expected a better jurist than Harriet Miers.
So, one of the primary reasons he was elected (and he knew this) was to appoint jurists such as this. The fact that he did not was a poke in the eye (as he also knew) of the respective electorate.
He is entitled to no credit for appointing a jurist simply silence the huge sh*t storm stirred up by the Miers appointment.
See if you can follow this train of thought. When we elect people and they know in advance why they are being elected, AND they lead the electorate to expect that they will do what they were elected to do (and then don’t do it), then you may see that W deserves squat in admiration for Alito.
That ain’t whining. It is a logical train of thought. We have a representative form of government and it’s not whining to expect representation.