Crescendo II

Jack Kelly joins the chorus:

I had wanted to wait until the hearings to make up my mind about Miss Miers. But now I fear continuing this debacle will produce the worst of all worlds for conservatives.

It's hard to find supporters of Harriet Miers beyond the president and the First Lady. Her only friend on the Judiciary Committee is Texas Senator John Cornyn. All the others, Democrat and Republican, will be asking tough, probing questions, for which there is no evidence Miss Miers can answer well.

The President needs to pull the plug on this nomination. He needs to fill in this hole before it gets deeper. If he keeps digging, his enemies will fill it in over his head.

To quote "Dandy" Don Meredith from early Monday Night Football broadcasts, "Turn out the lights, the party's over...."

UPDATE: Cap'n Ed doesn't think Bush will heed the handwriting on the wall:

[The "Krauthammer Option"i]s so easy that I'm almost certain now that Bush won't take this way out. He will remain stubborn and dare Republicans to vote against him openly. He will find out that some of them are now quite prepared to do so, having given them what they see as a sub-par nominee, which will turn what could have been a nine-day wonder into a lasting breach on the Right. This is why I wrote yesterday that I hope Bush withdraws Miers, but that if he insists on pushing her through, she surprises us all and demonstrates convincingly that she is the originalist that we all wanted. It's about the only way I see this playing out positively at all.

Wow, and I thought I was a cynical pessimist. Given the President's track record on this nomination, though, it's hard to argue that Morrissey isn't right on the money.

Still, I'm investing what may indeed be too much hope in the rumors that the White House is preparing to throw in the towel before this doomsday scenario can unfold.

One thing is certain: the President won't be able to do anything in the next three years without a unified GOP base behind him. If he's a big enough man to not let his pride drown his self-interested common sense, he'll do what has to be done.

If not, stick a fork in him, 'cause he'll be done.

UPDATE: The Seattle Times piles on....

UPDATE 10/26: Bench Memoer and Scalia disciple Ed Whelan says, "Withdraw!" This 1993 Miers speech unearthed in the Washington Post today was his (and many others') last straw:

Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers said in a speech more than a decade ago that "self-determination" should guide decisions about abortion and school prayer and that in cases where scientific facts are disputed and religious beliefs vary, "government should not act."

In a 1993 speech to a Dallas women's group, Miers talked about abortion, the separation of church and state, and how the issues play out in the legal system. "The underlying theme in most of these cases is the insistence of more self-determination," she said. "And the more I think about these issues, the more self-determination makes sense."

In that speech and others in the early 1990s when she was president of the Texas Bar Association, Miers also defended judges who order lawmakers to address social concerns. While judicial activism is derided by many conservatives, Miers said that sometimes "officials would rather abandon to the courts the hard questions so they can respond to constituents: I did not want to do that - the court is making me."

Miers, who was one of the first women to become a partner at a major Texas law firm, also showed sympathy for feminist causes, referring to the "glass ceiling" faced by professional women and urging her audience to support female candidates. She recited a list of national and state female leaders that crossed the political spectrum, including Gloria Steinem, then-first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX).

I suppose Miersians will argue that this was before she became a Bush groupie, but I have a difficult time reconciling "self-determination" on abortion and school prayer with "Don't worry, she goes to church so she'll vote against Roe." Coming on the heels of her evident commitment to reverse-Jim Crow (i.e. affirmative action) it does not remotely paint the portrait of "a Justice in the mold of Scalia and Thomas." Sounds a lot more like Ruth Bader Ginsberg to me.

And when the Miersians insist that "that was then and this is now," that her views on such matters have changed, how does that dovetail with the President's assertion that Miers' views - whatever they are "now" - won't change once she's on the SCOTUS?

Either Harriet Miers is a cloaked oligarchist or she's an insipient weathervane. Neither is acceptable, especially coming from a president who spent five years promising to appoint originalists when the time came.

Justice O'Connor is already on Olympus. Twenty-four years of "muddled thinking" is quite enough.

UPDATE II: Another Red-Stater sez Miers must go.

UPDATE III: Stanley Kurtz on what Ed Whelan's opposition to the Miers nomination means:

Ed is a former Scalia law clerk and the head of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is an informed and highly influential figure in conservative legal circles, and he has been rightly cautious and deliberate in the Miers matter. Ed's opinion is taken very seriously in DC, and the fact that he has now come out so openly and forcefully against Miers signals that this is a key moment. The Miers speeches have killed this nomination. It is imperative that the White House recognize this just as quickly as possible.

UPDATE IV: George Neumayr on the WaPo story:

"We gave up," said Harriet Miers in a speech to the Executive Women of Dallas, according to the Washington Post, "legislating religion or morality" a long time ago. It is hard to imagine that someone who thinks on such a lame level, accepting the tired fallacies of the left, could defend the original meaning of the Founding Fathers' words. This line from the speech should set off alarm bells too: "The ongoing debate continues surrounding the attempt to once again criminalize abortions or to once and for all guarantee the freedom of the individual women's [sic] right to decide for herself whether she will have an abortion."

O'Connor's replacement was supposed to end jurisprudence by liberal cliche; Miers will reinforce it.

UPDATE V: Did I mention Roger Clegg joined the withdrawal forces?

I cannot prove that Miers will be a bad justice. But that is not where the burden of proof lies. With stakes this high, conservatives should not be satisfied to roll the dice. To be worthy of our support, conservatives must be confident that she will be a good justice. At the least, we must be persuaded that the President could not find a confirmable nominee substantially better than Harriet Miers. That is simply not the case.

UPDATE VI: Concerned Women for America says time for the hook....

UPDATE VII: Matt Franck has had enough.

UPDATE VIII: Where d'ya think Derb stands?

Piling on is a thing I hate to do, and Miss Miers is obviously a pleasant, useful, hard-working & harmless person who's been put in an impossible position by GWB's blundering. But reading her thoughts, messages & speeches is dismaying. I mean, the sheer, dreary, numbing m--e--d--i--o--c--r--i--t--y of them.

This is a person who never had an original or interesting thought in her life. Reading Miers is like suffocating under a mountain of polystyrene packing blobbles. What on Earth does it say about the President that, knowing as he must have how completely and irredeemably second-rate she is, he would put her name forward?

The world, certainly in places like the Supreme Court, is a never-ending war of ideas. To ask which side of this war Miss Miers would fight on is pointless. She doesn't know the war is under way; and if she knew, she'd probably think it could easily be brought to an end if we'd all just be nicer to each other.

This is a terrible, awful blunder by George W. Bush.

UPDATE IX: The Cap'n is now off the fence:

I oppose the Miers nomination. I have no objection to allowing Miers her day in front of the Judiciary Committee; if the Bush Administration wants to subject itself to that kind of political damage, let it. The quality of her prepared speech strongly suggests that the White House will deeply regret that decision, but quite frankly, that will be their problem. The Judiciary Committee should reject her, as should the Senate, once her nomination hits the floor.

But if the White House has any sense left, they'll quickly withdraw her from consideration and spare itself further embarrassment.

It must be getting mighty lonely on Hewitt Island. Given the evident bitterness oozing out of Hugh's pro-Miers posts these days, the question seems to be whether he will ultimately throw in the towel formally or just taper off into embarrassed silence.

At this point I'm just about beyond caring.

The White House, however, had better realize that they don't have that luxury.