Yesterday I made the point that, even if presidents engage in ticket-balancing for some appointments, there are some jobs—like a justice on the Supreme Court—where the stakes are too high for such nonsense and he ought to forget about everything except getting the best qualified person possible on the Court. So the Miers pick is problematic even if you take sex and affirmative action out of the equation. Look at it this way: Suppose that the president had decided that, for political reasons, he really ought to nominate a Californian, had limited his search accordingly, and had finally nominated someone with Harriet Miers’s credentials from California. I think conservatives would be just as angry.