Yes, The Miers Mess DOES Matter

I've been reading over the past few days a fusillade of pooh-poohing from the Miersian forces (those diehards that remain, anyway) that the conservative split caused by this SCOTUS nomination is overblown and won't matter to GOP political health and unity in the long, or even short, run.

I didn't save any of the links, as I ran out of time last night to add another post on this before sleep mugged me. This morning, Tony Blankley beat me to it:

Those who claim that it is only Washington eggheads and activists who are disillusioned, misunderstand and underestimate the consequences of such Washington-based problems. The current Washington Republican negativity to President Bush is as a stone thrown into a lake - it will ripple outward until it causes waves on the distant shores of the heartland.

The problem is not merely with us obstreperous and self-important conservative columnists and pundits - though even our unloved tribe can cause measurable damage.

More importantly, the President is perilously close to duplicating the estrangement his father experienced from his congressional allies when G.H.W. Bush raised taxes in 1990. Just a year out from congressional elections, Republican congressmen and senators are in the process of making the practical judgment whether to distance themselves from the President to save their skins. I don't blame them. (After all, it's not as if he is currently championing their principles and policies domestically.) [emphases added]

The "read my lips" parallel occurred to me almost two weeks ago. In fact, a great deal of what I was posting over the past three weeks is now pouring forth in a right-wing flood.

As a practical matter, the anti-Bush resentment from his base would, assuming Miers was confirmed, linger for months, adversely impacting GOP chances the 2006 mid-terms (since the Republican Senate would have confirmed her). Figure in fresh left-activist SCOTUS rulings in which Miers voted with the majority in even one of them and the grassroots reaction would be positively sulfuric.

I think the only way the President wouldn't be politically disemboweled, either inexorably or catastrophically, would be if a Justice Miers provided the decisive vote on a ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. And bear in mind that in the thirty-two years since that "landmark decision," there's been one - ONE - case that fit that description (Casey). And the Justice on that SCOTUS that Miss Miers most resembles, Sandra Day O'Connor, didn't not vote to overturn Roe.

Conversely, withdrawing Miers (and thus averting a confirmation ambush as well as an unnecessary confrontation with his own party's senators) and replacing her with a bona vide constitutionalist judge would provide the President with...

...[the long-awaited] principled fight between conservatives and liberals (a debate that should break in his favor at least 60% to 40% nationally on the judicial issues), rather than the current idiotically unuseful fight between blind presidential loyalists and sighted presidential loyalists.

Hey, Dubya doesn't have to do what we say. But the presidency he'd be saving would be his own.

Having had a front row seat for the demise of his father's White House tenure, he really has no excuse for doing anything else.