The leaked Dobbs opinion drafted by Justice Samuel Alito has Ann Coulter in the mood to reflect on the controversy that put Alito on the Supreme Court in 2005: the rebellion in the conservative commentariat against George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriet Miers:
Here’s one reaction nobody’s having to the May 2 Supreme Court leak: “If only Harriet Miers were on the Court!” That was the woman President George W. Bush attempted to put there back in 2005, forever changing conservatives’ view of the man. . . . Only a man with Alito’s piercing intellect and deeply ingrained principles would have the balls to do what he (and at least four other justices) are about to do. . . . Neoconservative David Frum and I were the first to come out swinging against this Monty Python nomination, for which I will always respect him, though we don’t agree on much else these days. . . . Needless to say, Fox News was pedal-to-the-metal for Miers, repeating all the enraging arguments made on her behalf by the White House.
I have my own point of personal pride on this, because my writing on Miers — which started out skeptical and grew to full-throated opposition — got me noticed enough in the diaries at RedState to get me promoted to the front page, which was one of the steps along my path from lawyer who blogged about baseball on the side to full-time political writer.
Historically, however, what I think is under-discussed is the extent to which the anti-Miers movement proved, in retrospect, a dry run for the Never Trump movement in 2016. It engaged a lot of conservative commentators who were accustomed to defending Republicans in power suddenly saying, “Wait, this person is completely unqualified for this job, no matter what the party bigwigs tell me.” It was met with all the same sorts of appeals to team play and fellowship. Anti-Miers pundits were accused of excesses of elitism, of being out of step with The People.
Many of the same people who opposed Miers would go on to oppose Trump nine years later. Reel off the names: Erick Erickson, Leon Wolf, and I were there at RedState. Frum led the charge here at NRO. George Will was vocal. The list could go on. And yet, there were distinct strains of thought in the anti-Miers movement that would point the way to how differently people processed their revulsion to Trump. For some of us, the critique of Miers on grounds of her record, lack of proven competence, and the like was inseparable from an ideological critique: This was someone who had not proven herself capable or willing to go to war for conservative principles, so we doubted that she would stay strong in the storm. Alito, when put forward as a replacement, had everything Miers lacked: not just the skill as a legal writer and thinker, but the record (including his dissent in the Third Circuit in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) to show that he would be a reliable judicial conservative. Others, however — Frum being a major example of this — were less invested in conservative principle and more straightforwardly horrified by populist arguments against elite credentialism. That divide became clearer in the reaction to Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential nomination in 2008. Those of us who reviled Miers on movement-conservative grounds were, by and large, supportive of the Palin nomination at the time; whatever Palin’s shortcomings, we reasoned, her rock-ribbed social conservatism would be a helpful counterbalance to John McCain. The second group, by contrast, saw in Palin the same thing they saw in Miers: the unwashed horde.
It is unsurprising that the two groups, united against Miers and united in 2016 against Trump, have gone in very different directions as far as remaining conservative and Republican during and after the Trump presidency. It is also a notable mark in favor of the political shrewdness of Trump and those around him (Mike Pence in particular) that they understood that a Republican president could afford to offend the people who hated populism in general, but not those who valued the credentials of conservative judges.