Rove Redux

"Miers is ordinary (a more kind word than mediocre) and I think Bush wanted ordinary. . . . Shouldn't ordinary people have a representative on the Supreme Court?"

Doesn't sound like a bumper-sticker slogan to me.

Slate's John Dickerson picks up the "Gods vs. Geeks" theme:

"In this battle, the White House has clearly sided with the churchgoing masses against the Republican Party's own whiny Beltway intellectuals. The Bushies have always mistrusted their own bow-tied secularists, but the rift has never before been so public. 'This is classic elitism,' says a senior administration official of the GOP opposition to the Miers nomination. 'We often blame the left for it, but we have it in our own ranks. Just because she wasn't on a shortlist of conservatives who prepared their whole life for this moment doesn't make her any less conservative . . . and just because she hasn't penned op-eds for the Wall Street Journal doesn't mean she hasn't formed a judicial philosophy.'"

So there!

Historian David Greenberg offers a roll call of past hacks on the court, including Lincoln's campaign manager.

The New Republic's Noam Scheiber looks at the critics' credentials:

"In many ways, the biggest fault line emerging among conservatives is between East Coast elites, on the one hand, and rank-and-file conservatives elsewhere in the country. As soon as the nomination was announced, Beltway conservatives began griping that Miers, a former Dallas lawyer and a graduate of Southern Methodist University Law School, lacked the credentials to serve on the Supreme Court. 'An inspiring testament to the diversity of the president's cronies,' quipped National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru. Former Bush speechwriter David Frum argued that the conservative movement had spent decades grooming legal talent for the next Republican Supreme Court nomination.

"Promising young conservatives had attended top law schools, written weighty academic papers, embarked on distinguished careers as professors and judges--all to hone their legal philosophy for the day when they would be able to impose it on U.S. jurisprudence. For Bush 'to take a hazard on anything other than a known quantity of the highest intellectual and personal excellence' was 'simply reckless,' Frum concluded.

"Away from the Eastern seaboard, however, conservatives were warming to Miers. Irate National Review readers wrote to accuse the magazine of elitism. A conservative Texas lawyer complained that calling Miers's old firm 'undistinguished' was 'the kind of thing that only an absolute snob--someone who takes the position that no Texas firm could ever be anything but undistinguished--would say.' Meanwhile, prominent evangelical leaders were busy singing Miers's praises."

Kevin Drum wonders if a non-judge would bring some common sense:

"Oddly enough, I agree with the conservative White House lawyer who said this: