HARRIET MIERS - WRONG WOMAN, WRONG TIME, WRONG OFFICE

Here's some Harriet Miers roundups:

George Will says:

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks.

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It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role. Otherwise the sound principle of substantial deference to a president's choice of judicial nominees will dissolve into a rationalization for senatorial abdication of the duty to hold presidents to some standards of seriousness that will prevent them from reducing the Supreme Court to a private plaything useful for fulfilling whims on behalf of friends.

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Minutes after the president announced the nomination of his friend from Texas, another Texas friend, Robert Jordan, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, was on Fox News proclaiming what he and, no doubt, the White House that probably enlisted him for advocacy, considered glad and relevant tidings: Miers, said Jordan, has been a victim. She has been, he said contentedly, "discriminated against'' because of her gender.

Her victimization was not so severe that it prevented her from becoming the first female president of a Texas law firm as large as hers, president of the State Bar of Texas and a senior White House official. Still, playing the victim card clarified, as much as anything has so far done, her credentials, which are her chromosomes and their supposedly painful consequences. For this we need a conservative president?

Harry Reid supports her nomination. This alone is enough to make me oppose her.

WASHINGTON - When Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid surprised liberals this week by prominently applauding Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court, he was displaying a hint of his disdain for elitists as well as his admiration for a Western lawyer, who like him, pulled herself up by her bootstraps.

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Liberals have tried to link Miers, a longtime Bush loyalist, to their denunciations of Bush for cronyism. Reid himself on Tuesday called for changing "the culture of corruption and cronyism
spreading throughout the nation's capital - a culture that led to `Brownie' at FEMA and the failures of Katrina and the Republican scandals we're now reading about," he said, referring to the government's response to Hurricane Katrina under former Federal Emergency Management Agency head Michael Brown.

But, speaking to the bloggers, Reid made one thing clear about Miers: "I will include everybody as a crony, but not her, when I make my case."

Nominee 'Best Person I Could Find,' Bush Says. A reason or an excuse?

In another rarity for the president, he acknowledged that he responded to the views of senators, including Democrats, in making his choice.

He even quoted the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, who had urged the selection of a nominee from outside the "judicial monastery."

More and more I believe that the Miers nomination is the worst example of leadership and decision making that President Bush has yet displayed; but also the most straight forward and understandable. Bush's Rule #1: You stick with W. and you will be rewarded. "Rewards" for loyal team members are part of his style - the apparent stench of "cronyism" doesn't seem to have ever bothered W. This is not because he's dishonest, but because he truly believes that loyalty should be rewarded extravagantly. Let's hope the Senate can do the right thing and quash this bad presidential decision. They have the power, and most certainly the duty, to do so.