Stanley, you make very good points — if the nominee in question were for Secretary of State or even for an appellate court. What we’e talking about here is a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court that has been made in a manner that can only be considered cavalier. Which is to say, Bush wanted to give her the job and he gave her the job. If it could be demonstrated that the dozen or so other potential justices were unconfirmable — the extraordinary, courageous and principled potential justices who have spent their careers thinking and writing and judging Constitutional questions — and that therefore Bush needed a stealth nominee he could personally trust, that would be a different story. But with a 55-seat Republican majority in the Senate and the certainty that a Democratic filibuster would kick in the “nuclear option” breaking the filibuster, Bush did not need to go with stealth. The Roberts nomination proved that. People are saying this was a pick made out of weakness. I disagree. I think this was a pick made out of droit de seigneur — an “I am the president and this is what I want” arrogance. I think he’ll get what he wanted. Which means there will be at least two people — Bush and Harriet Miers — who will be delighted on the day she is sworn in. But probably not a whole lot more.