I was "underwhelmed" (as one pundit put it) with the appointment of Harriet Miers as Bush's nominee for the Supreme Court, although I was not totally suprised. Days earlier I heard several people (including Jay Sekulow) raising her name on cable news shows. Sekulow had been involved in "advisory" discussions and I am sure the administration was throwing the name out to test the waters. However, I didn't sense a lot of response to her name.
With further reflection, I continue to have mixed feelings about her appointment. I really thought it should be someone who has serious judicial experience (although this has not always happened in the past). On the other hand, I don't think a Supreme Court appointee should have to come from an Ivy League law school. Maybe there is a place for a person of the people to be on the court who represents the rest of the country.
Slate http://www.slate.com/ had an interesting headline on its web page today: "GOP Showdown: Intellectuals vs. Evangelicals." The article is at http://www.slate.com/?id=2127492&nav=tap2/. I enjoyed reflecting on the author's statement: In this battle, the White House has clearly sided with the churchgoing masses against the Republican Party's own whiny Beltway intellectuals. By the way the person who has a lot to lose in all this is Dr. James Dobson. If Miers does not turn out to be the kind of "evangelical" he wants (and not all evangelicals agree with him politically), Dobson's judgment or political acumen may be called into question by many of his supporters.
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