By nominating White House Counsel Harriet Miers to the USSC, George Bush has picked a huge fight. News article follows down below.

Miers has never been a judge. Strike one.

Miers’ personal legal philosophy will not be available to the Senate, because she has not written any judicial opinions, only advocacy pieces on behalf of clients. Strike two.

Miers will refuse to answer specific questions in the Senate, just as all recent nominees refuse to do. And the Democratic Senators will not feel comfortable that she is in the broad mainstream of American jurisprudence. Some Republicans will also not feel comfortable.

Her lack of judicial experience is kind of an insult to the USSC, in my view. Our top court should probably be comprised of persons with judicial experience, but that is not a Constitutional requirement.

Miers can be criticized for her lack of experience, and for her lack of a paper trial, and for her too-close connection as Bush’s lawyer. Critics will believe they know in their hearts that she is being selected because she has privately fully satisfied Bush about her Scalia-Thomas leanings.

Democrats will go to war. Republicans will not have a great deal of positive things to use to rebut the attack. The best the Republicans can do is point to Miers’ lack of bad things (no police record, etc) - Republicans cannot point to her mainstream conservative legal philosophy because she has no judicial paper trail.

And so, I smell a fierce war. Will there be a STRIKE THREE? Much too early to tell.

I’ll be watching this one closely.

See the Law-Courts category for how I handled the John Roberts nomination.

For some quick digging into Miers’ background from the opposition viewpoint, check out the Village Voice.

Conservative commentary about Miers -
See how the right wing activists at Free Republic view the Miers nomination. It’s all over the map, but here’s one negative example - “I am not surprised. When we went to vote in 2000 we thought we were getting a Ronald Reagan Conservative. In 2004, we were merely content to keep a Kennedy liberal out of the White House. Now it seems to be confirmed: When we elected and re-elected G.W. Bush, we got a younger version of his father. Conservatism is officially dead in Washington DC.”

Liberal commentary about Miers -
DailyKos discussion thread on Miers. The commentators note her involvement with charitable and religious agencies, and seem to feel that her nomination is another example of Bush cronyism.

Miers, White House Lawyer, Chosen by Bush for Court

Oct. 3 (Bloomberg) — U.S. President George W. Bush chose White House Counsel Harriet Miers, a fellow Texan and longtime confidant who has never served as a judge, to fill a second Supreme Court vacancy.

Miers, 60, would succeed retiring Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a swing vote on affirmative action and abortion cases, and become the third woman ever to sit on the nation’s top court.

“She has devoted her life to the rule of law and the cause of justice,'’ Bush said from the Oval Office in Washington. “She will be an outstanding addition to the Supreme Court of the United States.'’

Miers, who built her career on giving private advice rather than making public pronouncements, will pose a dilemma for congressional Democrats as they try to sort out what type of justice she would be. She is the first Supreme nominee with no prior judicial experience since 1971, when Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist were appointed.

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