What's On Her List Today?

Sorry, I couldn't resist. That's a Fred Meyer jingle. Fred Meyer, Harriet Miers....

{*sigh*} Well, I thought it was clever. But not like the White House thought nominating what the WaPo described yesterday as "a prom date" was clever.

Last week I wrote the following:

Note also [Scott McClellan's] complaint that the press has focused too much on "side issues like religion" and not enough on Miers' "record and qualifications." Two problems with that: it was the President himself who played up her religious convictions as a substitute for her missing judicial philosophy; and [drumroll] SHE DOESN'T HAVE ANY RECORD OR QUALIFICATIONS, at least none that merit a Supreme Court appointment. [Bleep]-[bleep], that's why Bush pushed her faith in the first place.

Monday the White House released Miers' "record and qualifications." K-Lo gives us the highlights:

The White House has sent out (painfully lame) "talking points" this morning on Harriet Miers' "qualifications." Let's just say it doesn't do much to help the case for her. In their "qualified by intellect" section the first sentence reads: "Harriet Miers was a pioneer in the Texas Legal Community, becoming the first woman to join her prestigious firm, the first woman to run a firm of significant size in Texas, the first woman to head the Dallas Bar Association and the first to be elected to head the State Bar Association of Texas."

Guys, you forgot to mention she's a woman.

And do you really expect people to be convinced she's a SCOTUS fit because: "Throughout her career in local, state and Federal governments, Harriet Miers has held herself to the highest ethical standards"?

Well, gee, nobody ever suggested that the woman was a crook. Otherwise her "intellectual qualifications" appear to be the she has a vagina.

John Podhoretz threw in this tidbit:

Having read through the Miers questionnaire supplied to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I note with shock that in a legal career that lasted more than 25 years, she argued 8 cases before juries: "I have identified eight cases that were tried to verdict. I was lead counsel or sole counsel in four, lead local counsel in one, and associate counsel in three." That number again: 8. Eight. E-I-G-H-T. Turns out that the number is pretty important in Miers's career, since it's exactly the same number of cases she dealt with at the appellate level as well.

Her entire combined courtroom experience in the course of her long career: 16 cases. Thus does the last prong in the Miers defense - that she will bring real-world lawyering experience to the bench - collapse like a house of cards.

No wonder public attention rushed on to her checked box on a 1989 questionnaire declaring herself in favor of a Human Life Amendment to the US Constitution. Which is mobilizing the Dem base to DEFCON1, and laying the groundwork for a Democrat ambush in the upcoming Judiciary Committee hearings, with filibuster to follow. And there's not a thing the White House can say in response, since they've made her religious convictions, and their implications for Roe v. Wade, their primary selling point.

Gerard Bradley says it well this morning:

[N]ow we are going to have the fight within the Senate and in the media which conservatives such as myself have all along called for. Unless Miers repudiates her 1989 answers — and, in that case, see above — Schumer & Co. are going to treat her as if she will overrule Roe. Very well. But if we are going to have a climactic battle in the Senate over Roe, we need to have it on considerably better ground. Miers is scarcely the person anyone would choose to make the long awaited case against Roe, with the whole pro-choice phalanx put up against her. I mean no insult whatsoever in saying that Harriet Miers simply is not up to the job of cogently describing, defending, and justifying before the world what will go into the history books as the most important constitutional law decision since 1954. John Roberts could have done it, as could Edith Jones, to name one available replacement. [hint, hint, hint]

All I would add to that is that we are going to have precisely the fight that the White House was trying to avoid. Only now it will be on behalf of a nominee they went out of their way, wittingly or unwittingly, to assure would be bereft of any natural constituency.

David Frum describes it this way:

Miers is trapped in a dilemma. Senators have been told that she is secretly pledged to overturn Roe v. Wade. If she allows that impression to stand, she loses pro-choice Republicans like Specter. If she disavows it, she loses conservative Republicans - and the party's activist base. And unlike John Roberts, she cannot pivot and evade because

a) conservatives don't trust her enough to keep quiet as she evades;

b) she is apparently not nimble enough to get away with it.

Small wonder that J-Pod is candidly predicting that, "If Miers doesn't get real better real fast, there's no way she is confirmed by the full Senate."