A Whiff of Good News

Today's Washington Times reports (h/t Conspirator Kerr):

The White House has begun making contingency plans for the withdrawal of Harriet Miers as President Bush's choice to fill a seat on the Supreme Court, conservative sources said yesterday.

"White House senior staff are starting to ask outside people, saying, 'We're not discussing pulling out her nomination, but if we were to, do you have any advice as to how we should do it?' " a conservative Republican with ties to the White House told The Washington Times yesterday.

* * *

"The political people in the White House are very worried about how she will do in the hearings," the second conservative leader said. "I think they have finally awakened."

I'm glad to hear it. I do find it a bit funny, though, that, if true, the White House seems to be paying closer attention to the details of the withdraw then it did to the details of the nomination itself. I suppose late is better than never.

And then there's George Will's compelling rejoinder to the anti-anti-Miers Hewitt-niks:

Miers's advocates tried the incense defense: Miers is pious. But that is irrelevant to her aptitude for constitutional reasoning. The crude people who crudely invoked it probably were sending a crude signal to conservatives who, the invokers evidently believe, are so crudely obsessed with abortion that they have an anti-constitutional willingness to overturn Roe v. Wade with an unreasoned act of judicial willfulness as raw as the 1973 decision itself.

In their unseemly eagerness to assure Miers's conservative detractors that she will reach the "right" results, her advocates betray complete incomprehension of this: Thoughtful conservatives' highest aim is not to achieve this or that particular outcome concerning this or that controversy. Rather, their aim for the Supreme Court is to replace semi-legislative reasoning with genuine constitutional reasoning about the Constitution's meaning as derived from close consideration of its text and structure. Such conservatives understand that how you get to a result is as important as the result. Indeed, in an important sense, the path that the Supreme Court takes to the result often is the result.

I've previously expressed the same view. I can't disagree with Will's observation: "Such is the perfect perversity of the nomination of Harriet Miers that it discredits, and even degrades, all who toil at justifying it."

Myopic Zeal has all the latest.