Did Bitterness Drive the Miers Appointment?

I wanted to compliment you on and thank you for your comments on the nomination of Harriet Miers for U.S. Supreme Court. Very even-handed and informative. As someone who lived in Dallas during Miers's college years (though I was a good bit younger), I can attest to your acute observations about Big D civic and social life in the 1960s. Miers strikes me, too, as competent and detail oriented. And I bet your observations on how she'll likely approach the job of being an associate justice are dead on. This, of course, is what makes her likely confirmation so deflating.

Through all the years of the Bush presidency, I've tended to err on the side of seeing a good portion of the criticism being flayed against him as personal lashing out by people disappointed by modern life. I'm not in love with the idea of the presidency or my sense of any previous president, save for a couple I'm way too young to know (not Kennedy, not Nixon, not even Reagan, though I see him far more favorably than I did at the time). And I don't have overblown expectations of folks on either side of the aisle, so I'm rarely deeply disappointed, as most people are most of the time (on both the left and right).

Also, I happen to support the cause in Iraq. And, I was pleased that he broached the idea of allowing people to invest a small percentage of their Social Security payments on their own. (It's simply immoral, in my view, to call it our retirement money when have no right to invest any of it on our own.) And tax cuts were a good idea at the time. But his follow through has been lackluster and patently unsuccessful. Not to mention that his proposal to have churches dispense social services--wrongheaded in practically every way--only made the culture wars worse. But now, this absent-minded appointment of Harriet Miers. Well . . . I think he and his coterie have finally fallen prey to bitterness. (God knows it would have been hard not to succumb. I think the hysteria around Bush has been worse even than that around Clinton.) For what other reason except to get back at your milieu would you nominate someone to the nation's highest, most important court who wouldn't be on the short list of anyone else in government or business or higher education? Even folks on your side of the political spectrum? It's a deal-breaking, childish act on his part. (Ack! I'm sounding like Maureen Dowd!)

Giving nominees an oral grilling on the law and the separation of powers seems so obvious, so necessary. Perhaps it's not done because, as you suggested, so many of those asking the questions would reveal how little they know.

The anti-snobbery defense of Miers is an understandable but wrong-headed one--doubly so when it comes from graduates of large, research-oriented public universities that attract great students with low tuitions. My father, a math and physics major at Davidson (a far more academically oriented school then and now than SMU), always had that same southern chip on his shoulder about the Ivy League. Then I went to Princeton, and he discovered that they really do teach you more there. Most important, of course, is that nobody would care where Miers had gone to school if she had a track record, whether as a scholar, a policy maker, or a litigator, on constitutional law.

Let's just hope that Bush doesn't try to apply his populist instincts to the Fed chairmanship. (I'm rooting for Ben Bernanke.)

UPDATE: Greetings, Drezernites. For fuller context on what I think about Miers's education, please read down the main blog page. There's a lot there, beginning with this post.