Miers nomination is on life support or worse at this point, and it should, in fact, must result in some serious soul searching over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, because this presidency teters on the edge of an abyss. If it continues to push ahead without the base all of the political capitol will be gone, which is sad for all of us conservatives.

The movement is at a crossroads and desperately needs leadership. Someone need to step up to carry the ball, but it looks like the President has checked out, the Senate Majority leader is a squish, and Hastert seems to lack iniative. Tom Coburn and Mike Pence stand as shining examples of what we need, but have issues of their own. Pence lacks the gravitas in his position to really be a leader, and Coburn is hamstrung by the nature of the Senate. Both are doing a fantastic job but we need more voices in the chorus. Ironically, all signs point to one man who has the capability to save this mess, but the question is, will he do it.

Rick Santorum is that man.

Now I know many of you think that this is insane, but Rick has the power, the gravitas, and the cajones (just read up on what he did as a member of the Gang of Seven in the House) to be the leader of the movement and save not only the party but his own re-elect. Recently, he’s shown a concerning leftward drift, and taking up the banner once more could yield immense political benefits. But will he do it? I am inclined to think no, but if there is a hope to salvaging this mess before the ‘06 elections, then the only man in the position to do it is the Junior Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum.

I tried my best to hold back reactionary criticism of Miers and not get swept up in the mob mentality. As passions have cooled, it is now clear that Miers must be withdrawn or withdraw herself.

Read this article by Edward Whelan on Miers’ 1993 speech which suggests that she affirms Casey v. Planned Parenthood. This is the cinderblock that broke the camel’s back.

If you haven’t yet done so, please sign David Frum’s petition to withdraw the Miers nomination. I did just today. Email this link to our allies: http://frum.nationalreview.com/petition/

Robert Bork has come out strongly against Miers nomination, is he a false, disloyal conservative as well? Of course not, but that won’t stop party hacks from smearing him and anyone else you rebels against the party line.

TUCKER CARLSON, MSNBC HOST: Are you impressed by the president’s choice of Harriet Miers?

JUDGE ROBERT BORK, FORMER SUPREME COURT NOMINEE: Not a bit. I think it’s a disaster on every level.

CARLSON: Why? Explain the levels on which it’s a disaster.

BORK: Well, the first one is, that this is a woman who’s undoubtedly as wonderful a person as they say she is, but so far as anyone can tell she has no experience with constitutional law whatever. Now it’s a little late to develop a constitutional philosophy or begin to work it out when you’re on the court already. So that—I’m afraid she’s likely to be influenced by factors, such as personal sympathies and so forth, that she shouldn’t be influenced by. I don’t expect that she can be, as the president says, a great justice.

But the other level is more worrisome, in a way: it’s kind of a slap in the face to the conservatives who’ve been building up a conservative legal movement for the last 20 years. There’s all kinds of people, now, on the federal bench and some in the law schools who have worked out consistent philosophies of sticking with the original principles of the Constitution. And all of those people have been overlooked. And I think one of the messages here is, don’t write, don’t say anything controversial before you’re nominated.

It’s odd that Justice Roberts, who is now the chief justice, and who will probably be an excellent choice in many ways, also had no track record that was easy to follow.

Yeah I guess Judge Bork doesn’t know what he is talking about.

Newt Gingrich inadvertently proves why we can’t have Miers:

Conservatives should feel confident with the selection of Harriet Miers to replace Sandra Day O’Connor on the Supreme Court for a simple reason: George W. Bush selected her.

Come on Newt. I know you meant this in a good way, but it had the opposite effect. The whole argument for supporting Miers is that we should “just trust our President”, nice try but no dice.

Much has been made in the press about conservative unhappiness with the White House on issues such as spending and immigration and most recently with the selection of Ms. Miers. However, while these tensions are not insignificant, the president has stayed remarkably true to conservative principles on every major decision he has made since winning the Republican primary.

What!? Newt, Bush has not stayed “remarkably true to conservative principles on every major decision”. The deficit is not conservative, the Medicare bill was not conservative, the highway bill was not conservative, in fact President Bush has governed much like his father did.

Read the whole thing, just don’t laugh too hard.

From the Washington Post:

When in 1962 Edward Moore Kennedy ran for his brother’s seat in the Senate, his opponent famously said that if Kennedy’s name had been Edward Moore, his candidacy would have been a joke. If Harriet Miers were not a crony of the president of the United States, her nomination to the Supreme Court would be a joke, as it would have occurred to no one else to nominate her.

Ouch. It gets harsher though.

There are 1,084,504 lawyers in the United States. What distinguishes Harriet Miers from any of them, other than her connection with the president? To have selected her, when conservative jurisprudence has J. Harvie Wilkinson, Michael Luttig, Michael McConnell and at least a dozen others on a bench deeper than that of the New York Yankees, is scandalous.

Bush is standing firm behind his nominee though, the man has never made a tactical retreat in his life.

This quote from Krauthammer sums up my every concern:

By choosing a nominee suggested by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and well known only to himself, the president has ducked a fight on the most important domestic question dividing liberals from conservatives: the principles by which one should read and interpret the Constitution. For a presidency marked by a courageous willingness to think and do big things, this nomination is a sorry retreat into smallness.

Joseph McCarthy,

You wrote that we didn’t support Judge Roberts. Where was this? I posted something from Ann Coulter, but explicitly stated that I didn’t think she believed what she was writing. Further, I helped organize students to go down to the Roberts confirmation and protest in support of him.

I just wanted to point out that the Roberts nomination and Miers nomination are not equivalent at all. Roberts is clearly a constitutionalist if you take a close look at his judicial decisions, while Miers is completely unknown.

I recently posted an article by the American Thinker that supported the Miers nomination so that we could see another side, even though I generally disagree with him. How can you say that we’re blinded by our own ideology?

And as for your argument in defense of Miers, it is truly on thin ice. There are many more qualified candidates in this country based on experience and known judicial philosophy.

The only argument I can come up with in favor of Miers is that Bush may realize that there needs to be some ambiguity as to how Miers will vote in order to get the RINOs to support the 5th judicial conservative that will tip the scales, whenever that may come.

Trust me, Bush is saying. Trust but verify, they should reply.

For as of today there is no evidence Harriet Miers possesses the judicial philosophy, strength of intellect, firmness of conviction or deep understanding of the gravity of the matters on which her vote would be decisive to be confirmed as Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.

If she does not exhibit these qualities in testimony before the Judiciary Committee, Harriet Miers should be rejected.

You said it Pat.

This article in the Washington Post captures the essence of the opposition to Miers nomination.

Bush tried to defuse the smoldering conservative revolt with a Rose Garden news conference Tuesday, and the White House followed up yesterday by dispatching Gillespie, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman and presidential aide Tim Goeglein to meetings that regularly bring together the city’s most influential fiscal, religious and business conservatives.

“The message of the meetings was the president consulted with 80 United States senators but didn’t consult with the people who elected him,” said Manuel A. Miranda, a former nominations counsel for Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), who attended both private meetings.

Weyrich, who hosted one of the meetings, said afterward that he had rarely seen the level of passion at one of his weekly sessions. “This kind of emotional thing will not happen” often, Weyrich said. But he feared the White House advisers did not really grasp the seriousness of the conservative grievance. “I don’t know if they got the message. I didn’t sense that they really understand where people were coming from.”

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform and host of the other meeting, declined to comment on the discussion because of its presumption of confidentiality but said there is widespread concern given the experience with the nomination of Justice David H. Souter, who proved more liberal once on the bench. “There’s a great deal of frustration because of the Souter experience,” Norquist said. “The problem is there’s no fixing, there’s no allaying those fears. For the president to say ‘Trust me,’ it’s what he needs to say and has to say, but it doesn’t calm the waters.”

Trust me. President Bush is living in a bubble if he thinks his base is going to trust him on this one. The sad thing is, there was no reason for us to even be in this situation in the first place. If Bush had put up a nominee whose views were well known then it wouldn’t have even been an issue.

At Weyrich’s two-hour luncheon featuring Mehlman and Goeglein addressing 85 activists, the host opened the discussion by rejecting Bush’s call to trust him. “I told Mehlman that I had had five ‘trust-mes’ in my long history here . . . and I said, ‘I’m sorry, but the president saying he knows her heart is insufficient,” Weyrich said, referring to Republican court appointments that resulted in disappointment for conservatives.

Inside and outside the beltway many conservatives feel cheated. President Bush has failed once again to make the right decision.

The New York Times is claiming that she became a Republican in 1979 when she became a born again Christian. That doesn’t explain why she gave money to Al Gore nearly a decade afterwards in 1988.

Via Confirm Them: George Will doesn’t think it is important that Miers be confirmed, though he thinks that it might be important that she not be.

Senator Brownback (R-Kansas) has echoed everything we have written here at Save the GOP (proving that even the GOP heavy hitters are nervous) with this statement:

Senator Sam Brownback says he and other conservatives have “a great deal of skepticism” about Harriet Miers, President Bush’s latest nominee for the Supreme Court.

The Kansas Republican is disappointed Bush did not pick a candidate with more of a track record. He had urged Bush to nominate someone who opposes the Roe vs. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Brownback compared the nomination of Miers — Bush’s White House counsel — to that of Supreme Court Justice David Souter. Souter was nominated to the high court by the first President Bush and was believed to be a conservative, but he later turned out to be liberal on the bench.

Brownback is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. He will meet with Miers in his Senate office on Thursday.

This from The New Republic is also distressing:

For instance economic conservatives pleased by her corporate law background may find it distressing that in 1990 Miers voted for a 7 percent property tax increase during her short tenure on the Dallas City Council.

Please, someone tell me this a joke. She voted increased property taxes 7%! Again, this is after the supposed 1979 “conversion”.

This final bit, from the American Bar Assoc. is the most troublesome to me:

International Criminal Court

Recommends the development and establishment of an International Criminal Court.

In my mind this qualifies her for immediate impeachment if she ever becomes a justice.

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.

If you haven’t read this article via Drudge from the American Thinker, then you should. I think he makes some excellent points about how conservatives wanted a fight. But maybe a fight would have done more than merely satisfied our appetites.

On one hand, if Bush had put up a known constitutionalist, it could have been turned into a campaign issue that would have energized voters. But if our RINO brethren had been complicit in his or her downfall, we may very likely have seen a conservative demoralization not known since the days of Souter and new taxes. Perhaps the hypothetical party purge that would ensue would have been good for conservatives in the long run, but judicial conservatism would have been dealt another 20 year blow.

His optimism of a third (or possibly 4th) Supreme Court nominee is perhaps the best justification for the Miers nomination. It is now the autumn of 2005 and Bush has nominated 2 people to SCOTUS. Who knows what chances he will encounter by the autumn of 2008. It is reasonable to assume that the 85 year-old Stevens would have held out until his death to retire if Bush had nominated a known judicial conservative.

This may have disarmed our old pal Stevens, and we can only hope and pray that we will be able to wish him a happy 88th birthday, addressing him as a former Supreme Court Justice.

What Bush has done is not a small deal, Bush has betrayed us. New reports are coming out that are saying that in “An indication of her stance on gay rights comes from this questionnaire from the Lesbian/Gay Political Coalition of Dallas Miers filled out while running for the Dallas City Council in 1989. In it, she supported full civil rights for gays and lesbians and backed AIDS education programs for the city of Dallas.” We cannot roll over and die on this one. Conservatives must draw a line in the sand and let the administration know that this is unacceptable. I don’t care if Dobson, Sekulow or whoever says that we should support this decision. Where is the boldness and backbone of Regan?