Harriet Miers for SCOTUS

Hugh Hewitt wrote this morning about the president's nomination:

The president is a poker player in a long game. He's decided to take a sure win with a good sized pot. I trust him. So should his supporters.

Uh, thanks for the sentiment, Hugh, but I'm not sure I agree. The Supreme Court of the United States is too important to treat it like a poker game, and Harriet Miers is nothing close to a "sure win." The bar is higher with Supreme Court nominees, both from the standpoint of the quality of the nominee and the willingness of the opposition to obstruct, and I'm not sure George W. Bush cleared that bar.

Miers is suspect off the bat, for the simple fact that she is short on judicial experience and long on friendship with the president. As Powerline's John Hinderaker wrote this morning about Bush:

"He had a number of great candidates to choose from, and instead of picking one of them -- Luttig, McConnell, Brown, or a number of others -- he nominated someone whose only obvious qualification is her relationship with him."

If you think the scream from the left was deafening when they requested written opinions by Miguel Estrada and John Roberts, get out your earplugs — PFAW, MoveOn, NARAL and the other typical Democratic puppeteers will be relentless, obnoxious and completely unreasonable in their demands for Miers' writing during her time as White House Counsel. With no other information to go on, the puppets — Biden, Feinstein, Kennedy, Schumer, etc. — will need very little from the hearings to find a way to oppose Miers.

I am not saying I think Miers is another David Souter, mostly because I have nothing to go on right now. But President Bush has made another appointment to an incredibly important position based on — get ready to hear this word on an endless basis — the Cronyism factor. She was involved in the 2000 campaign, and helped manage the Bush v. Gore court cases. Bush could have chosen a thoughtful jurist with a solid, conservative bent, a nominee whose intellect would make it difficult to hand obstruction excuses to the Democrats; instead, he chose someone who was directly involved in one of the most partisan issues of our day, the 2000 Florida debacle. Why not just give Patrick Leahy an engraved invitation to be a thorn in the administration's side?

Bush must know that the Democrats will pound on this nominee before letting Sandra Day O'Connor's position move right without a fight. Miers faces a long road toward earning approval, and she will already miss at least two months of caseload; if she is somehow defeated, that means the first half of the court's docket is wasted.

George W. Bush said in his 2000 campaign that Common Sense was all-too-uncommon in the country. This pick seems to lack that very trait.