George Will on Miers - For this we need a conservative president?

So far, with the exception of certain Republican party hacks (cough, Ken Mehlman, cough), the political right wing has registered a top-to-bottom negative response to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court.

George Will weighs in today with as caustic an assessment of the talents and impulses of George W. Bush as anything I have read. He begins by paying proper respect, abandoned by many conservatives during the Roberts confirmation process, to the senate's constitutional prerogative of advice and consent.

Senators beginning what ought to be a protracted and exacting scrutiny of Harriet Miers should be guided by three rules. First, it is not important that she be confirmed. Second, it might be very important that she not be. Third, the presumption -- perhaps rebuttable but certainly in need of rebutting -- should be that her nomination is not a defensible exercise of presidential discretion to which senatorial deference is due.

Certainly, this is true of the Miers nomination. It is, in fact, true of every Supreme Court nomination. Bush's insistence on an automatic up-or-down vote for, and confirmation of his every nominee rejects the literal instruction of the very text whose literal interpretation he claims to revere:

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law (United States Constitution, Article II, Section 2, Clause 2):

Will goes on:

It is not important that she be confirmed because there is no evidence that she is among the leading lights of American jurisprudence, or that she possesses talents commensurate with the Supreme Court's tasks. The president's "argument" for her amounts to: Trust me. There is no reason to, for several reasons.

He has neither the inclination nor the ability to make sophisticated judgments about competing approaches to construing the Constitution. Few presidents acquire such abilities in the course of their pre-presidential careers, and this president particularly is not disposed to such reflections.

And,

It is important that Miers not be confirmed unless, in her 61st year, she suddenly and unexpectedly is found to have hitherto undisclosed interests and talents pertinent to the court's role.

This is a long-overdue repudiation of Bush's famed and utterly ridiculous reliance on his "gut" rather than on reason. The president proposes to install on this nation's highest court a political functionary whose only apparent qualification is that he knows her.

The most curious aspect of this spectacle is Bush's unwillingness or inability (or both) to articulate a single empirical argument toward persuading Americans that Miers is fit to serve in this capacity. It is as though Bush is trying to see just how badly he can insult people's intelligence before they call him on it. "Now, watch this drive!"

The president has chosen to stake his ground, and this nation's future, on the proposition that he knows best and that the people and their representatives have no option other than to take his word for it. Even the extreme right wing of American politics blanches at that notion. The only question now is whether our elected representatives in the senate will faithfully discharge their constitutional duty and hold Bush to account.