How Much Does Bush Want Miers?

The AmSpec's Washington Prowler is reporting that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter is pissed beyond belief over the Harriet Miers nomination:

The apparent depth of anger Senator Arlen Specter feels toward the way the White House and Miers have approached the nomination process has apparently not been portrayed accurately by the mainstream press. "It wouldn't be possible to describe how angry he is," says a Judiciary Committee source. "Livid, murderously mad, nothing does it justice, pardon the pun."

Specter is not only angry about the questionnaire that Miers and her handlers submitted. He is angry at the reports he is getting back from his fellow Senators coming out of their private meetings with Miers. "They are universally negative," says Republican staffer for a Senator who has met with the nominee. The bad reports are making Specter feel put upon.

They're making him feel like the White House is leaving him to hold the bag (no pun intended). In that sense you can almost not blame Specter for such prickliness, notorious for it though he is.

And the White House is apparently getting the message, though drawing the diametrically wrong lesson from it. For rather than doing the sane thing, bowing to reality, and withdrawing the Miers nomination, the Bushies are preparing to commit another act of anti-conservative treachery:

Now word is coming out of the White House that it might not be opposed to Specter being allowed to offer his [embryonic] stem cell legislation as an amendment to the Labor-Health approps bill. And what does the White House get out of it? Specter's backing off from vocal criticism of SCOTUS nominee Harriet Miers.

"We don't do that kind of horsetrading on those kinds of issues," says a White House source. But the Miers nomination now may be in enough trouble that a desperate White House might be willing to look the other way for Specter's silence.

And if the President were willing to let Specter sneak through an ESC amendment, wouldn't that seem to imply that he wouldn't veto the Labor-Health appropriations bill because of it? And hasn't Bush solemnly pledged to veto ANY ESC legislation?

How does that feel, social conservatives? This White House condescendingly panders to you - to us - by trying to sell Harriet Miers as just short of a nun, attempting to auction off her Roe vote in exchange for our blind support, and when we wouldn't be so easily swindled, now thinks (perhaps) nothing of pirhouetting into throwing away its once-principled opposition to destroying human embryos for dubious, unproven medical research so that the man equally as notorious for his hostility to evangelicals will - perhaps - go easy on "his girl".

We're still not learning much about Ms. Miers (well, we are, but work with me here...), but we're getting quite an education about her "constituency of one," and it definitely resides in the "far more than I ever wanted know" category.