Supreme Court Nominees

I have been silent on the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, largely because the Constitution doesn't allow us to elect Supreme Court justices. Rather, we get to elect a President and he gets to select justices. Now along comes Power Line and sums up my feelings completely:

One nuance I find particularly noteworthy is the way in which many conservatives ignore the tension between opposing Miers on ideological grounds and having spent the past five years arguing that the president has the right to have qualified nominees confirmed regardless of their ideology, so long as they are not extreme. Indeed, while conservatives argued that liberal Democrats should vote to confirm qualified conservative nominees (and that moderate Republican Senators certainly should), some conservatives now oppose Miers because she may be moderate or because she's not the right kind of conservative.

And there's more by the same author here:

Miers has achieved just about everything a lawyer can accomplish--head of a substantial law firm, head of the state bar association, and top legal adviser to the president. She also has a background in local politics. Only by insisting that a Supreme Court nominee possess either judicial experience or a portfolio of scholarly writings can one pronounce Miers unqualified. But this has never been the standard, and it's not clear why (ideological considerations aside) Republicans should invent a new standard with which to deal a blow to a Republican president.