Really, It Isn't About Harriet Miers

....but George W. Bush, who, as Robert Novak reported Saturday, wasn't letting an absence of fealty to "strict constructionism" stand in the way of scoring an Affirmative Actionesque SCOTUS coup:

President Bush had advised senators that his probable choice for the Supreme Court was federal Circuit Judge Consuelo Callahan of California. Bush touted Callahan's diversity as a Hispanic woman, but she is liberal enough to be recommended for the high court by Democratic Senator Charles Schumer. [emphasis added]

So Bush wanted to elevate an avowed oligarchist judge because (1) she's Hispanic (as opposed to Emilio Garza) and (2) a woman (as opposed to Edith Holland Jones, Priscilla Owen, or Janice Rogers Brown). But he apparently flinched from that choice because he concluded that that would cause his own base to erupt like a supervolcano. So he chose - at White House Chief of Staff Andy Card's behest - to go the stealth route with the woman Card himself couldn't wait to transfer out of his own operation.

If the Callahan story is true, that suggests that the people on whom Dubya is trying to pull a fast one with his Peter Principle of a White House counsel are not the Democrats. And that's all the more reason to fight the Miers nomination to the death, if for no other reason than to either bring the President back to his senses - or prove that "the fruit don't fall far from the tree" after all.

[HT: Bench Memos]