For whatever reason, the president has picked a woman who not only has no constitutional or judicial experience but even in her business practice has demonstrated no interest in the law as anything other than a source of billable hours. At 60 years old, she appears never to have had a substantive conversation about law or policy with any friend. She comes from a closed and cronyish legal and business culture and appears to have gotten ahead through a combination of networking, nose-to-the-grindstone diligence, and willingness to do her law firm's management, rather than legal, work.

Her selection is an insult to women, to evangelical Christians, and to corporate lawyers. Is this really the best these groups have to offer to U.S. Supreme Court?

Unlike some social conservatives, my concerns are not results-oriented. As a matter of policy, I am perfectly happy to have abortion legal, with some restrictions, and actively support gay marriage. If there were any evidence (other than my friend Hugh Hewitt's imaginings) that Harriet Miers shared Richard Epstein's views on affirmative action, I'd give her a pass on that. (Now there' a line of questioning for the Judiciary Committee: Would you agree with Richard Epstein on affirmative action? Does she even know who he is or what he says?)

But the Supreme Court is not a legislature, in which the standard for a justice is whether he or she will "vote right." Supreme Court decisions set precedents beyond the case at hand, and they do that through the arguments they make--the very sort of logic and rhetoric Miers shows absolutely no interest in or competence for. Being the president's friend and lawyer, like being of the right sex and religion, does not by itself meet the requirements of the job.

At the invitation of David Frum, I have joined the advisory board of Americans for Better Justice, a group of people who have supported President Bush but who do not support this nomination. ABJ's website has more information about the organization, which will be running TV ads asking the president to withdraw the nomination, and what citizens can do to let the Senate and president know that America deserves better.

My previous posts on the Miers nomination, in reverse chronological order, are here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

UPDATE: There's lots more on Marginal Revolution.

Perhaps, but the terroir does more than support its own myth. It makes Paris Paris--the metropolis in a rural country. Already under the influence of Eugen Weber's fiesty France: Fin de Siècle, which draws a stark contrast between city and countryside at that time, I flew into Paris for the first time last week. Where was the city? I wondered. The pilot said was were just 15 minutes from landing, but we were over the boondocks. Even the Greenville-Spartanburg airport, which lies between those two South Carolina cities, isn't in such rural territory. Something weird--or at least weird to an American--is clearly going on.

As one reader comments: " I NEVER thought I'd be so entranced with an article about a quick-clean product. I own one of these great little contraptions and I have to admit it was fascinating to learn its story, from concept to development. The P&G and Ideo duo is a creative force to be reckoned with."

We've poked and prodded into her personal and professional life, interviewed scores of people, looking for anything that bears on her qualification for a seat on the Supreme Court.

And after all that, not one associate here was found with the view that she is unqualified for the position.

Yet skepticism remains high, even among some of President Bush's strongest supporters. Some have even raised the idea that her nomination be withdrawn. So what gives? We've got great confidence expressed by those who know her best and grave doubts expressed by those who know her least.

In this view, only corruption, utter stupidity, professional failure, or ideological extremism (whatever that is) warrants opposition. So if you think a nominee is simply so-so--in this case, the successful product of a closed, parochial local business culture that eschews substantive debate--you should just shut up. Or, alternatively, try to destroy her.

Mr. Martinez had grown up around his father's eatery, El Charo. Tequila was tough to come by then, he said, and the margarita was an exotic drink that most people only consumed on vacations in Mexico.

But the elder Mr. Martinez occasionally would make the frozen drink in a blender for his patrons. When his son opened his own restaurant, he knew that frozen margaritas would help his establishment stand out.

The harried bartenders at Mariano's couldn't squeeze enough limes or blend the drinks fast enough to keep up with demand, though. Customers complained – the signature drink was inconsistent, and it wasn't even cold.

"I saw my dream evaporating," Mr. Martinez said. "This was my one shot at being somebody."

A pit stop at a 7-Eleven proved inspiring. Mr. Martinez spotted a Slurpee machine and knew he'd found the answer. He acquired a soft-serve ice cream machine and started mixing.

"The challenge was to make each drink taste like a blender margarita," he said. "We kept experimenting – and tasting."

Once Mr. Martinez hit upon the right recipe – sugar was the secret ingredient, he said – he moved the machine to the bar.

"It became an instant success," he said. "We didn't have to sell it."

Mr. Martinez never got a patent for his margarita machine, so copycats quickly surfaced. Soon, other bars and restaurants were pouring frozen margaritas, and a few claimed to have acquired "Mariano's secret recipe."

"I never dreamed that I invented anything," Mr. Martinez said. "To me, it was just a way of producing consistent, quality, cold margaritas."

Martinez's original machine was just added to the Smithsonian's collection of American inventions.

NOTE: This item has been moved up from last week.

Just about everybody who served or worked with Harriet Miers during her brief political career in Dallas remembers her as a hard-working, fair-minded moderate. When the Dallas political spectrum is properly framed against the national matrix, that means many people elsewhere will view her as a right-wing Christian nut case.

The article offers a nice roundup of what people who've worked with her on political issues say about Miers. Unfortunately, it tells us nothing about her judicial philosophy, assuming she has one beyond trying to be fair-minded.

No, I think people are enraged in large measure because, given a terribly important appointment opportunity, Bush has made himself look like the dumb, parochial, cronyist hack that his enemies have always said he was . That makes anyone who actively supported him look like a fool. (I would distinguish between "actively supported" and "voted for," since, unlike a president picking a Supreme Court justice, voters didn't have much to choose from.) David Frum, who is taking some unfair abuse for questioning Miers's qualifications, posts the following reader comment, among many others:

You just gave a laundry list of "why Miers" with a negative point of view. Why on earth did you not apply the same principles, questions and concerns about W?

He appointed a loyal friend because that's what he knows and understands. He has never been required to perform, has never been held accountable, and has rarely, if ever suffered any negative consequences he actually earned. This character forming lifestyle began in his youth and continues.

You supported the most unqualified, unaccomplished, unremarkable man who has probably ever even considered running for major office.

I think that last line is hyperbole, but, in light of this nomination, it doesn't look like a complete slur.

Miers holds herself out as practicing law in the areas of Antitrust & Trade Regulation, and Litigation & Appeals. But over thirty years, she is only listed as an attorney on 16 decisions, arising from 13 cases. Seven of these decisions were appeals.

Some of this is due, no doubt, to her areas of practice. Complex litigation may take years to reach completion. Businesses tend to favor out-of-court settlements. But it is also more than likely that her skills in trade regulation were primarily exercised as a negotiator and scrivener in the conference room, not in the court room.

The number of cases involving large national businesses is also not encouraging. Companies like Microsoft have large legal teams, which may simply use local counsel to make sure that in-house filings are consistent with local practice, as well as provide "local color."

One other explanation for her relative paucity of reported decisions is that she has been involved in numerous trade associations, committees and charities. These are all laudable, but they most likely took away from traditional legal practice. As would management of a law firm.

My own area of practice -- environmental law -- would not fare well in comparison either. But I think lawyers can excel and have admirable careers and still not be well-qualified for the Supreme Court.

On a positive note, my hairdresser, who worked with her on a project to help abused children, says Miers is a sweet person. But he hasn't seen her in eight years.

I am one of the folks who sometimes get defensive when prestige of colleges comes up. As the son of non-college educated parents of moderate means, any college was college and that was progress; therefore I am a proud graduate of West Texas State.

The difference between me and many of those commenting on this touchy subject is that I can't pretend that West Texas State is the "Harvard of the Panhandle." Failure to realize that going to any school other than the elites puts you at a day one disadvantage seems to me to be an indication that maybe a person lacks the reasoning ability that would have allowed them to get in an elite school. Fortunately after day one comes day two, and on day two I have the option to work that silver-spooned, soft-bellied SOB into the dirt. (kidding, but just sorta)

We live in a "what have you done for me lately" world, and that is a tremendous equalizer. All that I read in your remarks is "what has Miers done for me lately?" If Miers had a distinguished body of work that seemed related to the task of Supreme Court Justice and was still being criticized about choice in law school, I would be personally angry as I often personalize that type of slight, but I don’t see that. What I see is someone that was nominated to the Supreme Court because of who they know. Sure going to Harvard law probably gets you invited to some nice cocktail parties, but apparently being a part of the Texas good ole' boy and gal system gets you nominated to the Supreme Court. For consistency's sake, shouldn't the same people who get angry because of non-merit advantages that an Ivy League grad might enjoy also get angry when that non-merit advantage comes from another source?

Quite so.

Today's DMN looks at Miers's corporate litigation career and finds little of Supreme Court substance: "Over her career as a corporate litigator, she became recognized as among the best in her field. Ms. Miers' reputation was largely built on her work ethic and personality while engaging in relatively routine legal matters – disputes over bank notes, fraud allegations against insurers, class-action lawsuits."

I think your perspective is heavily Dallas-centric. As a native Texan who had the audacity to go out of state for college and law school both, I was struck by the incredible difference between Dallas law firms and Houston law firms when I was interviewing for summer clerkships. Although it is generalizing somewhat, Houston is considerably more meritocratic than Dallas.

I interviewed with every major Texas firm in Dallas and/or Houston (including the firms that combined to form Harriet Miers's). As a native of San Antonio, I had absolutely no connection to either city, and I came from the lower middle class anyway * no country clubs or society balls in my background. In Houston, interviewers were consistently impressed by my academic credentials. In Dallas, I faced constant questions about my connections to the city, who I knew (no one), who my daddy knew (no one), etc. Over the course of my ten callback interviews in Dallas, I got the strong sense that those firms would have preferred an SMU/SMU resume (as long as it also had Highland Park H.S. and Highland Park C.C. on it) to my "top-20 university/top 5% at top-10 law school" credentials.

Harriet Miers has spent her life in Dallas, and done extremely well in its connections-oriented legal culture--so well that one of her Dallas friends has now nominated her to the Supreme Court. That gives me the creeps. If she had a record as a constitutional thinker, I might feel differently. But then, if she had a record as a constitutional thinker, she wouldn't have fit in in Dallas.

I agree that the best students at SMU are as smart as good students at Ivy League or equivalent schools (students like me, in other words, not supergenius physics majors or folks named Volokh). But that's not the point. Making distinctions is important in the law, so let's try to make a few. This is not an argument about I.Q. The argument about schools is an argument about the value added by those schools, mostly environment and curriculum. The argument about Miers, who graduated from law school 35 years ago, is an argument about intellectual interests, intellectual temperament, and specific legal expertise--and is mostly a guessing game at this point.

If you care about what two equally smart people learn in college, at least two factors make an important difference: who your fellow students are and what the curriculum demands. Will you be around lots of people as smart as or smarter than you and just as hard working? Will they be intellectually curious or just trying to get their tickets punched? While the Ivy League is no Cal Tech, the answer is a lot more likely to be yes at Princeton than at SMU. As for what the syllabi expect, there's no comparison.

Harriet Miers's academic record, as I've written, suggests that she is very smart and was a hard working, serious student. There are lots of other equally smart, equally hard working graduates of hundreds of different law schools. That doesn't make them Supreme Court material. If Miers had a record as a constitutional lawyer, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

In addition to dropping trade barriers, a new technology may be responsible for increasing demand for avocados - I know it has for my family. The process (see http://www.fresherunderpressure.com/) uses pressure rather than heat to pasteurize foods. This makes things like orange juice (and - relevant to this discussion - avocados) taste fresh and unprocessed for weeks.

AvoClassic (http://www.avoclassic.com/) uses the technology to make their tasty and extremely inexpensive pre-made guacamole. For many years I was a die-hard about making guacamole using only fresh, ripe avocados, garlic, limes, and salt (with an occasional minced chili pepper). But at a price per pouch of fresh-tasting guacamole that is about equal to the price of a single [frequently unripe] Haas avocado, AvoClassic guacamole is responsible for multiplying my family's consumption of avocados over the last two years by 5-10 times the previous rate.

The technology predates the drop of trade barriers, but it seems to have hitched a ride on the booming avocado market. Some nice synergy there.

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.

UPDATE: Reading the fine print, reader Mike Beversluis says I underestimated Advanced Calculus. "I'm sorry to be pedantic, but since Courses 37-39 include integral and differential calculus, they are equivalent to Princeton's freshman Calculus. Advanced Calculus is the proof class, and probably fell between Princeton's current MAT215 and MAT315 listings." I was an English major--you expect me to read?

Rebuilding lives and communities does not, however, mean returning the economy to exactly where it was before. Rather, a disaster tends to accelerate economic changes that are already under way. That is because some physical assets, whether outdated manufacturing plants or homes in declining areas, are worth keeping only because they were paid for long ago and cost next to nothing to use. They would cost more to replace than they are worth.

"Any modern economy is normally in constant flux," Professor Horwich wrote. "As such, the destruction of physical assets is a form of accelerated depreciation that hastens the adoption of new technologies and varieties of investment." In Kobe, the plastic shoe industry never came back after the earthquake, and air freight expanded at the expense of the port.

The more flexibility businesses and individuals have, the more adaptable they can be and the faster recovery can take place. That is one reason money helps more than in-kind gifts. Donors, Professor Horwich said, "can only guess what recipients want most" and often provide gifts of clothes or food in forms that are hard to use.

The same principle applies to the rebuilding commitments now being made in Washington. The final cost of Katrina relief is widely expected to top $100 billion, and the Louisiana Congressional delegation has submitted its own $250 billion wish list.

Those are very big numbers. With $100 billion, the government could give every man, woman and child from New Orleans a check for $200,000. Expanding these payments to the entire metropolitan area would allow a generous $75,000 per resident.

Yet nobody expects the displaced residents of New Orleans to see anything close to those potentially life-changing amounts. Federal spending is aimed not at "rebuilding lives" but at "rebuilding communities," primarily by spending a lot of money on construction projects and on government services.

But, the Harvard economist Edward L. Glaeser argues, such an approach is backward. "If there is disaster insurance, then it is, presumably, the people of New Orleans who are insured, not the place itself," he writes in an article for The Economists' Voice, an online journal (www.bepress.com/ev). The article is called "Should the Government Rebuild New Orleans, or Just Give Residents Checks?" He favors the latter.

Another reason a lawyer planning to practice in Dallas might stay at SMU for law school is that the personal and professional contacts acquired there would be infinitely more valuable than those acquired at say, Harvard or Stanford. In most of the South, and much of the Midwest for that matter, the business, professional and political elites are alumni of the flagship state university (say Ole Miss or UNC Chapel Hill) or a handful of elite regional private colleges and universities (SMU, Vanderbilt, William & Mary). Ivy League backgrounds are not an asset in this part of the world.

A good example of this is Hillary Clinton. Much of the Whitewater saga revolved around her attempts, as a young partner in a Southern law firm, to develop legal business. Despite the fact that she is bright, a world champion networker and has stellar credentials she ended up falling back on her husband's political cronies like Jim McDougal. Her Wellesley/Yale axis of contacts, so valuable in New York or Washington, proved useless in Arkansas. (How many Wellesley grads have ever been to Arkansas, for Heaven's sake?)

This is quite right. Texas is certainly run by UT, SMU, and A&M grads, with the occasional Bush thrown in for diversity.

At the SMU library I got an original of her 1992 Texas Lawyer article. The worst writing quoted in Time-- "freedom of liberties," for instance--in fact reflects Nexis typos. (Miers wrote "freedom of religion," in that case.) The prose is indeed clunky, however, and the article is banal in that well-known corporate way, where you make an argument--her main point is that the courts need more money--without any sharp points.

To see for yourself, download my .pdf scan of the piece, minus the headline, which wouldn't fit on the microfiche reader's copy space.

To major in math, students had to take one semester of Advanced Calculus (the catalogue lists no non-Advanced Calculus, so I take this to be what was known at Princeton as "freshman calculus"), Differential Equations, Introduction to Linear Algebra, and "nine additional semester-hours of advanced work in the department or in physics." The math department's advanced courses included a second semester of calculus, several actuarial and finance-oriented courses, College Geometry ("modern synthetica plane geometry...a continuation of classical high school geometry"), probability and statistics, the Teaching of Mathematics, Introduction to Modern Algebra ("an introduction to the principal modern algebraic systems; integral domains; groups, rings, and fields"), and a directed readings option. The department also offered a number of high-school-level algebra, geometry, and trig courses, though presumably majors took a more demanding curriculum. Grad courses were also open to seniors.

UPDATE: Here's a PDF file of SMU's math curriculum when Miers was an undergrad.

It does not, first of all, imply that she "could not get into" a school with a national reputation. Until very, very recently, southerners--even incredibly smart southerners--almost never considered leaving the region to go to college. (The exceptions were a few legacies from prep-school-oriented families.) For a bright woman in the early 1960s, a good private school like SMU would have been plenty ambitious. In Dallas, people today are still impressed by an SMU degree and even more by an SMU Law School degree. And, aside from her White House stint, Miers has spent her life in Dallas.

In Miers's day, SMU was a predominantly female undergraduate institution with an almost entirely male law school. Then, as now, it was a rich kids' school, a lot like the University of Southern California until recently. You can get a fine education there, but too few students bother. (To upgrade its program, the university has in recent years aggressively recruited scholarship students.) Miers appears to have been an unusually serious SMU student and, as far as I can tell from the one yearbook from her undergrad days left in the SMU library, she did not join a sorority--which would make her quite unusual. Kids at SMU take partying much more seriously than they take academics. (I often joke that while the UCLA library has many more books, the great thing about SMU's library is that none of the books are ever checked out.) From her academic record alone, it's clear that Miers is a self-directed person who does not simply follow the crowd.

But I'm still not impressed. SMU, which provides most of the Postrel family income, is a decent school. But it is not a place that demands that a student stretch her mind. Miers has never been in a scholarly environment where she was surrounded by people who were smarter than she and just as hard working. She has had a demanding, successful career in a fairly parochial environment where she could easily impress people. And she appears to be a legal technician, not part of the cosmopolitan debate over legal ideas, a debate that emphatically includes conservative voices.

Maybe the Supreme Court needs parochial judges--though David Souter already fills that role--just as it arguably needs people who've practiced law. But I'm skeptical

Longtime friend Merrie Spaeth, a Dallas communications consultant, said one of the most remarkable things is how discreet Ms. Miers is, how she holds her tongue even in private, when friends and political allies let down their hair.

"Not only did Harriet never tell a joke, she never laughed. She might smile so she didn't look stern. But she would never say anything snide," Ms. Spaeth said.

"In the 22 years I've known here I've never heard her use a curse word. Not even 'hell' or 'damn.' I've never heard her gossip. I've never heard her say a nasty word."

I'm sure she's ladylike yet tough as nails. But that doesn't make her qualified for the U.S. Supreme Court.

Perez's crop is but a trickle in a river of avocados flooding the United States from Mexico, where exports have more than doubled in volume this year over last. The reason? Growers finally have attained unimpeded entree to the U.S. market after eight decades of barriers. Many packing houses are working multiple shifts to feed U.S. avocado demand, which is growing 15% a year.

"It is going to remain this way," Perez said. The opening of the U.S. market "has changed the industry for good."

So sure are Perez and partner Miguel Torres of a continuing bonanza that they hired 20 additional workers this year--a 50% bumping up of the payroll--and invested $4 million in a computerized sorting system to more efficiently box their Senor Avo brand of fruit.

What's driving growth in avocado exports is the elimination of trade barriers and sanitary bans that for most of the last century kept the U.S. market off limits to Mexican fruit. The boost also is thanks to the surprisingly strong growth in U.S. consumption. According to the Irvine-based California Avocado Commission, the state industry's marketing arm, total U.S. avocado sales will reach 440,000 tons this year, an 80% increase from the total consumed in 2000.

"Guacamole's gone mainstream," said John Loughridge, vice president of Coral Gables, Fla.-based Del Monte Fresh Produce Co., the fruit wholesaling giant that buys 90% of Perez's avocados and distributes them across the United States.

"The growth is due to avocados' favorable health aspects, the immigration trend and the popularity of Mexican cuisine," said Loughridge, who added that his company had come "from nowhere" to become the nation's second-largest avocado wholesaler partly because of its strong links to Michoacan producers.

Mexico has grabbed an increasing share of the expanding U.S. market. Benjamin Grayeb Ruiz, a Michoacan grower and current president of that state's growers and packers association, says Mexican exports will reach 100,000 tons this year, up from 42,632 in 2004. That would put Mexico on par with top-ranked Chile, which last year shipped 100,000 tons of avocados into the U.S. market.

Blanketed with avocado orchards, the rolling hills of western Michoacan state are alive with commerce. Uruapan, a city of 250,000, is the nerve center. Equipment firms, truck fleets, sanitary inspectors and orchard workers are all thriving in an industry that will pump about $400 million into the local economy this year, a 50% increase from five years ago. The number of packing plants has grown to 23 from 12 three years ago....

Out-of-work Mexicans are flocking to Michoacan from other states, lured by field wages that have grown 25% to 33% in two years.

"The market has been much better than we thought," Grayeb said. "But we invested a lot of time and money to make it happen."

Next up: Convincing the Chinese to eat avocados. Read the whole article.

She has also earned a reputation as exacting, detail-oriented, and meticulous -- to a fault, her critics say.

"She can't separate the forest from the trees," says one former White House staffer.

But Miers' supporters say her emphasis on detail and procedure are exactly what the Office of the White House Counsel requires.

"She is very thorough and very hard-working and very conscientious and very careful, which is why she was a good choice for staff secretary and why she's a good choice as counsel," notes Brett Kavanaugh, a former White House associate counsel who replaced Miers as staff secretary in the summer of 2003....

Her critics say the problem goes beyond what Miers does or doesn't know about policy -- and right back to a near-obsession with detail and process.

"There's a stalemate there," says one person familiar with the chief of staff's office. "The process can't move forward because you have to get every conceivable piece of background before you can move onto the next level. People are talking about a focus on process that is so intense it gets in the way of substance."...

"In my view, she's a lawyer's lawyer [who] grasps facts very quickly, in terms of sizing up a situation," says James Francis, who was chairman of Bush's 1994 gubernatorial campaign and suggested that Miers become campaign counsel.

"She doesn't make careless mistakes and doesn't tolerate careless mistakes in others," adds Francis, who runs his own investment company.

Based on this rather limited sample, I'd say that if you want to be a Bush appointee to the Supreme Court, you've got to be someone other people call "smart," but absolutely, positively not an intellectual--not a systematizer, not a pattern finder, not a theorist, not someone who sees the forest, not, in other words, a person your critics could possibly call an "ideologue." With a nod toward human resources lingo, we can call it the Miers-Briggs Test: Only "S"'s need apply.

Link to National Law Journal via D Magazine's FrontBurner, which is covering the Dallas angle on Miers.