Bruce Kesler writes: “Republicans really need to seriously consider whether the reaction by some stalwarts regarding the Supreme Court nomination has any chance of succeeding at either derailing it or of strengthening the party for its many other interests. I believe not. It is immature venting. It is unnecessarily divisive. It is not successful politics.” He continues in this vein.

The criticism is unlikely to derail the nomination, but I do not believe that it has no chance of contributing to a derailment. Moreover, I suspect that the White House has hated this last week and will not want to repeat the experience if it finds itself needing to fill another vacancy.

But I think Kesler is wrong for a reason that goes beyond these points. Conservative journalists and spokesmen have to be able to say that certain things should be done even if those things are unlikely or are almost certainly not going to be done. Sometimes their saying so will have effects down the line. The conservative (and neoconservative) criticism of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy was unrealistic in several respects–it advocated a course of action that could not really have been adopted. But it also made it possible for Reagan to follow a more robust foreign policy later.

Even if it didn’t, however, conservatives would still have to say what they believe to be true. If conservatism is going to have any intellectual integrity to it, George Will has to be able to write a column about how he thinks senators should consider the Miers nomination without being tied to how they are likely to consider it. The job of a conservative thinker isn’t the same as that of a conservative politician, and neither should be evaluated by the criteria rightly applied to the other. A Republican senator shouldn’t speak of Miers the way Charles Krauthammer or William Kristol have, but that’s not an indictment of those two.

As a political tactic, insisting that further discussion is pointless because it’s a done deal may be the smartest move the pro-Miers people have yet made in dealing with the conservative objectors. It’s more compelling than the M&Ms defense. It may move the many conservatives who are unhappy with the pick but find the conservative infighting of the past week unpleasant and would like to see it end. (It also maintains a certain consistency of tone, since the opening gambit of the defenders was to suggest that conservatives aren’t supposed to question the president’s choice of nominees.) The defect of this sort of defense is that it dissolves the instant the nomination looks as though it is in serious jeopardy.