John’s Blog

At the gym this morning in total darkness, I listened a bunch to NPR and watched the various news shows — and the story coming out today is going to clearly be something along the lines of “Bush’s Base Controls Supreme Court Pick” or something like that — being about how these right-wingers didn’t think Miers was pro-life enough to be nominated. This seems laughable to me, as W did everything but say, “hey, she’s one of us. she’ll vote our way” and do a big wink to the cameras. Seems to me that the right wing interest groups wanted her to say what she’d do, and that’s a pretty horrible way to choose a justice, for any number of reasons.

The way that she pulled out this morning, by saying that she didn’t want to divulge the work she did with the President, since it’s covered by executive privilege, is pretext, clearly — she just wasn’t going to have the votes. But it creates another problem…most people think W’s short list is something like Janice Brown, Edith Clement, Edith Jones and Al Gonzales. (Not to mention some conservative white guys like Michael Luttig.) Torture memo notwithstanding, Gonzales is the most moderate of the bunch, but seems to me that he’s impossible, and will have the exact same set of issues that Miers is stating for her withdrawal (executive privilege) because of his time in the White House.

So it feels to me like we’ll get someone from the far right — Janice or one of the Ediths. And Harry Reid’s words today as Minority Leader in the Senate smell to me like fighting words.

Maybe the administration figures a nasty Supreme Court fight will be better news cycles than Rove’s or Libby’s indictments.