The Miers Melee

On Monday, President Bush nominated White House counsel Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court to succeed the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. In the days since then, the debate over whether Miers should be on the bench has erupted. In that debate, the usual front lines have been shifted.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) immediately announced his support for Miers though that enthusiastic support was later withdrawn as conservatives have criticized Miers as a nominee.

President Bush has started the campaign to win support for his nominee and has also brought former Republican senator Dan Coats to help Miers through the process. Coats has already made a mistake so far in his job, which provides us with this hilarious excerpt from this New York Times article:

"Ms. Miers's defenders have said she does not have to be a constitutional scholar to sit on the court, a sentiment that Dan Coats, the former Republican senator who has been asked by the White House to shepherd Ms. Miers through the Senate confirmation process, reiterated Friday, his first full day on the job.

"'If great intellectual powerhouse is a qualification to be a member of the court and represent the American people and the wishes of the American people and to interpret the Constitution, then I think we have a court so skewed on the intellectual side that we may not be getting representation of America as a whole,' Mr. Coats said in a CNN interview."

In addition to that, conservative commentators and other conservative power players have been in open opposition (the Washington Post has used the word "uprising") and has called for the president to withdraw Miers from nomination.

Withdraw Miers from nomination?

What happened to all the calls for "up-or-down" votes? The issue of the spring for conservatives was for nominees to have a confirmation vote on the Senate floor. From Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) to a petition urging the Senate to give each nominee a vote to an entire website devoted to attacking the Democrats on this issue, Republicans and their allies had used the entire spring to talk about the virtues of an "up-or-down" vote.


The virtues of an "up-or-down" vote don't seem to apply to Harriet Miers.

So why are so many of these people now calling for Miers to never see the Senate floor? Not even for confirmation hearings to find out her stances?

Perhaps those same activists to have the Miers nomination should listen to their own words from only six months ago. Even if they still don't like Miers, they can work to persuade senators to vote not to replace Justice O'Connor with Miers. Yet it seems that all that virtue used in the spring has flown away now that there is a nominee they're don't think is qualified in their views.