Over at one of our other blogs, a former colleague of Miers–unnamed there, but, in all likelihood, Reginald Brown–writes a defense of her nomination and critique of George Will’s column. It is well worth reading. I want to dispute a minor point of his.

Will had written that “the president has forfeited his right to be trusted as a custodian of the Constitution” by signing McCain-Feingold even though he had previously said that it was unconstitutional and that presidents had a duty to veto unconstitutional laws. Brown defends Bush’s signing of an admittedly “bad” bill because “the politics of the entire situation were plain, and understandable, to all involved.”

I take Brown to be saying that Bush had to sign the law given its popularity. But that wasn’t clear to everyone at the time, and I don’t think it’s true. You could make a case that the president had to impose temporary tariffs on steel given the fact that he had promised to do so and that his promise had helped him carry the Ohio River Valley states. You could make a case that he had to enact some kind of prescription-drug benefit, if not the precise one he did, in order to get re-elected. The argument that he had to sign McCain-Feingold strikes me as much less plausible. If Bush had vetoed that bill, he would have gotten a lot of bad press and maybe even dipped a little in the polls. But there was never any evidence that many voters cared about campaign-finance reform or that anyone would vote on it. In fact, it ranked very, very low in surveys of voters’ concerns. Nobody had ever lost an election over opposing it. The signing of the bill does, I think, represent a black mark on the president’s record, precisely because it displayed too casual an attitude toward the Constitution.

Moreover, let’s not forget that the president has called for new campaign-finance restrictions since signing McCain-Feingold. Nobody has maintained that he was under any political compulsion then.