A Godsend

MIERS IS OUT.

WASHINGTON -- Under withering attack from conservatives, President Bush abandoned his push to put loyalist Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court and promised a quick replacement Thursday. Democrats accused him of bowing to the "radical right wing of the Republican Party."

The White House said Miers had withdrawn because of senators' demands to see internal documents related to her role as counsel to the president. But politics played a larger role: Bush's conservative backers had doubts about her ideological purity, and Democrats had little incentive to help the nominee or the embattled GOP president.

"Let's move on," said Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi. "In a month, who will remember the name Harriet Miers?"

The withdrawal stunned Washington on a day when the capital was awaiting potential bad news for the administration on another front _ the possible indictments of senior White House aides in the CIA leak case. Earlier in the week, the U.S. military death toll in Iraq hit 2,000.

Much to the dismay of the Dems, the Harriet Miers era has ended.

Miers' Letter to the President

President Bush's Statement

Her fate is sealed. She will be a footnote in American history rather than a Supreme Court justice.

I never bought the theory that her nomination was all part of a grand scheme, that Bush threw Harriet Miers out there as a sacrificial lamb, that he never thought she would be confirmed, that it was all a set-up to get a more hard-line conservative on the Court.

However, as it turns out, Miers served that purpose. The Right's rejection of Miers does give Bush an opportunity he would not have had if conservatives had fallen in lockstep behind his choice, kool-aid drinking Dem-style.

Bush, the uniter, gets to say to Dems that he tried to offer a consensus nominee. (That's Dem-speak for someone likely to be a Sandra Day O'Connor waffler, or a woman in Souter's clothing.)

The President now can truthfully say that in spite of his best efforts, Republican senators were not going to confirm Miers.

So, he's been forced to offer his Party a nominee more to their liking, someone more likely to rile the Dems.

The Dems have been hacking away at Bush for so long now, doing all they can to weaken him. It looks like their relentless pounding has had an impact. They wanted a weakened Bush; they got it. Ironically, their success in that effort, their joy at the embattled Bush, will come back to bite them--hard.

Now, there is guaranteed to be a bitter fight for O’Connor’s Supreme Court seat.

From the Dems’ perspective, this falls in the category of "Be careful what you wish for."

Actually, I find the timing of the Miers withdrawal to be quite opportune for Republicans.

The fact that Bush will soon be announcing another nominee has to derail, to some extent, the salivating liberal mainstream media's frenzied coverage of the Fitzgerald investigation. Miers stepping aside demands attention from the media. They have to take resources off the Nadagate story. Miers has pushed all that indictment speculation to the back burner, at least temporarily.

It also forces the Dems to scatter in order to start preparing to attack an unknown target.

I think the Miers withdrawal can be seen as a welcomed deflection for the White House.

It gives Bush an opportunity to regroup. The conservative base is definitely charged up and now he can get that energized herd back on the ranch.

All in all, I think that the Miers nomination may have been a godsend for the conservative movement.