Somewhere in Georgetown, a woman named Harriet Miers is curled up on her sofa in her spartan but meticulously clean 1-bedroom apartment, tears silently streaming down her face as she watches a tape of the President announcing her SCOTUS nomination. She rewinds the tape again and again, basking in the blue glow of past glory, the fleeting apotheosis of decades of concerted ass-kissing and kowtowing. And now it’s gone. All gone.
If Miers had a public history of being a loud and proud right-wing zealot, she would have survived the confirmation process. If she had a CV that illustrated a long and rich career of Constitutional litigation and scholarship, she would have survived the confirmation process. She had neither, and that’s what killed her. Now we wait and see whether the next nominee will trigger holy war or not.
