Bush's Supreme Moment

George W. Bush had a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Not-So-Bad week.

I'm riffing, in case you haven't had the pleasure of reading it, on the children's book about a grumpy boy named Alexander, whose relentlessly calamitous day stretched from waking up with gum in his hair to finding lima beans on his dinner plate.

The president's week has managed to rival Alexander's day in sheer rottenness -- with one glaring exception: the Supreme Court.

His biggest loss was on the immigration bill. Its defeat not only meant the end of efforts, at least for the remainder of this presidency, to fix the immigration system. It was the death knell for any chance Bush had to add something to his scant domestic legacy in the remaining 16-plus months of his presidency.

Whatever political capital the president had after the 2004 election, it's gone now. He could persuade only 12 senators of his party (and just three of the 21 up for reelection) to join him to try to salvage the bill. Not even the minority leader, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, would go along.

The immigration outcome was bad news for the president's party as well, even if many Republicans don't yet realize it. Yes, railing about amnesty may help them with base voters in 2008. But alienating the fast-growing bloc of Hispanic voters is in the long run a losing electoral strategy.

The second unfortunate event for the president was the defection of key Republicans, led by Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar, on his surge strategy for Iraq. When Lugar talks, Republicans listen -- even if no one happens to be on the Senate floor at the time. So Lugar's comments nudged fellow Sens. George Voinovich of Ohio and, more tentatively, the Armed Services Committee's ranking Republican, John Warner of Virginia, out of hibernation on the issue.

This development was less dire for the president than the immigration vote, because it was simply a matter of time before his party broke with him on Iraq. Republican lawmakers had already delivered a "see you in September" message indicating that their patience was wearing thin.

Then there was Bush's assertion of executive privilege in the face of congressional demands for documents and testimony about the firing of U.S. attorneys. For any president, invoking the privilege inevitably carries with it the whiff of Nixonian stonewalling. In truth, presidents of both parties have a legitimate, although not absolute, need for private, unvarnished advice from aides. But no president wants to spend his time fighting off congressional subpoenas or, for that matter, commuting the sentences of top aides convicted of lying under oath.

Which leads to the Not-So-Bad part of the president's week. The Supreme Court's first full term with Bush's two justices in place made clear that this president has succeeded where the two Republican presidents before him failed.

Ronald Reagan named three justices -- one reliable conservative, Antonin Scalia, and two less-than-consistent ones, Sandra Day O'Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy. From a conservative's point of view, George H.W. Bush's record wasn't much better: He named Clarence Thomas but also David H. Souter, who has become a stalwart of the court's liberal bloc.

The current President Bush, it can now safely be said, is 2 for 2 with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. If Souter surprised, if O'Connor at times disappointed, Roberts and Alito have, so far, consistently delivered for the president who supported them.

The president once said that he wanted to name justices in the mold of Scalia and Thomas. At least in terms of bottom-line results, it appears that he did. Roberts and Alito are, to borrow a phrase from the first president Bush, a kinder, gentler version of Scalia and Thomas. Their votes this term showed them paired more often than any other two justices and, without any significant exception, taking the conservative point of view.

At 57 (Alito) and a mere 52 (Roberts), the new justices aren't going anywhere anytime soon. As a result, Bush's court legacy won't be easily undone. With the court's conservatives so much younger than its liberal members, the next vacancies are likely to come from the liberal bloc. If so, the best-case scenario for a Democratic president would be to maintain the current conservative balance -- hardly an occasion for cheering. By contrast, a Republican successor could cement Bush's conservative court, making Kennedy irrelevant to the extent that, as swing justice, he tilts occasionally to the liberal side.

In his dissent in the school desegregation case on the final day of the term, Justice Stephen Breyer underscored the impact of the two new justices. "It is not often in the law," he said, "that so few have so quickly changed so much."

Not a bad blurb for an otherwise failed presidency.

Subscribe to the podcast of this column at http://www.washingtonpost.com/podcast. The writer's e-mail address is marcusr@washpost.com.