I think that Professor Bainbridge’s rebuttal to Hewitt and cross-applied Ruffini is just fantastic so here it is:

Hewitt’s Still Wrong

Hugh Hewitt continues to defend the Harriet Miers nomination, now by attacking his usual allies on the right. He lays into Rammesh Ponnuru for not bowing down before “scholar” Doug Kmiec’s defense of Miers (Hugh’s choice to emphasize Kmiec’s scholarly credentials is a bit odd, given that in the same post he defends Miers for lacking precisely that qualification.)

The central point of scholar Kmeic’s piece:

[Roberts and Miers] are both steadfast adherents to a judicial ethic of no personally imposed points of view. The cognoscenti snicker when the president reaffirms his criterion of judges who will shun legislating from the bench, since to legal realists, it is inconceivable and to political ideologues it is a missed opportunity. They all do, they all will, goes the refrain. To which Roberts repeatedly answered: No, not this umpire. The same answer can be expected from Miers as she makes her bid to join the officiating crew.

… The refusal of Ponnuru to engage Kmeik’s central argument about ther nature of the battle between results-oriented conservatives and the Roberts-Miers approach doesn’t decide the merits of Kmeic’s argument, but it does reveal that some of the critics of Miers aren’t prepared to answer the charge that their criticism is more disappointment that their own preferred nominee was not selected than serious argument that Miers is a Souter of some sort.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The problem is that people like Hewitt and Kmiec want us to take on faith the proposition that Harriet Miers will “shun legislating from the bench.” Yet, neither Hugh nor Kmiec marshall any evidence from Miers’ record to support that proposition. Hugh’s repeated card - and its the only one he has to play, in my view - is to ask us to trust Bush. So for Hugh, here’s why I am unwilling to trust Bush on this one.

1.
We are told Miers was surprised and upset that her White House office was staffed by Federalist Society types who loathed her beloved ABA.
2.
David Frum, who worked with Miers in the White House, says that “In a White House that hero-worshiped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.” I’m sure even Hugh, who may be Bush’s most consistent defender, would be led to wonder just how many men Miers has met. Bush may have many virtues, but being the sharpest knife in the drawer isn;t one of them.
3.
Frum also says: “She is not the person to lead the court in new directions.” Unfortunately, shunning “legislating from the bench,” as Kmiec put it, is precisely the new direction in which this court most needs to be led.
4.
Why is the leader of a party that is supposedly against affirmative action making an appointment that can only be explained as an affirmative action choice?
5.
You don’t take a Saturday Night Special to an artillery duel. The Supreme Court is the big leagues. You don’t bring your B team to the World Series. Miers may well be a smart lawyer. But she went to the #52 ranked law school in the country and then headed up a Dallas law firm that one of my colleagues who practiced in Dallas tells me got big but was not in the first rank. And, as Pejman observed, “Crashing through glass ceilings is impressive. But the Supreme Court demands more than that.” Call me an intellectual snob if you want, but while I don’t insist on Ivy League credentials, I do insist on documented high power thinking.
6.
As the WSJ observed today, Miers lack of defined views on the great legal questions of the day is troubling precisely because: “The lesson of other Republican nominees without such fixed views — Harry Blackmun, Mr. Souter, Anthony Kennedy — is that they always drift to the left once they get on the Court.”
7.
Hugh has also failed to grapple with the Journal’s observation that Miers’ silence on the great issues of the day is troubling precisely because: “The lesson this nomination in particular will send to younger lawyers is to keep your opinions to yourself, don’t join the Federalist Society, and, heaven forbid, never write an op-ed piece.”
8.
Manuel Miranda made a closely related point, which I find quite important: “The nomination of Harriet Miers has not rid us of the repugnant situation that a jurist with a clear and distinguished record will not be nominated for higher service. The nomination did not rid us of the apprehension of stealth nominees.”
9.
Harry Ried and left-leaning blawgs like TalkLeft like her.
10.
Senator John Cornyn, who knows Miers well, has been quoted as saying that “She is obviously not a Scalia or a Thomas.” Isn’t a Scalia or Thomas precisely what Bush promised us? I’m starting to lose track of the number of promises Bush made to his base and has now broken.
11.
She is a long-time Bush crony. After Mike Brown, Julie Myers and Eduardo Aguirre, and ffive of the top 8 FEMA leaders, to mention just a few, I’ve had my fill of Bush cronies in high positions. And, yes, part of the disappointment is that Bush went with a crony when there are so many other vastly superior candidates out there: “she’s going to the Supreme Court while people like Michael Luttig, Priscilla Owen, Janice Rogers Brown & Emilio Garza are being left on the sidelines.”

Hugh insults Miers’ conservative critics by saying things like:

* …some of the critics of Miers aren’t prepared to answer the charge that their criticism is more disappointment that their own preferred nominee was not selected than serious argument that Miers is a Souter of some sort.
* Because they did not know her, they assumed she could not be worth supporting. The cronyism of the chattering class seems to have triumphed over any kind of analysis or credit-according the sort of experiences that ordinary Americans value. …
* Taking the ball and going home because the nominee doesn’t know you by your first name is hardly principle at work, and the refusal to see what she brings to the table isn’t argument

It would be nice if Hugh recognized that Miers’ critics are making principled arguments and joined issue with them instead of just mocking them.

Update: Ponnuru responds to Hewitt here.