Some of the reaction to the withdrawal of the Miers nomination seems to, barely, miss the point. Hopefully the President’s advisors get the message better than some of the media.
The Miers withdrawal is deeply embarrassing to Bush, who should be able to get his pick of Supreme Court justices with a 55-seat Senate GOP majority.
Instead, he was forced to cave in to conservative opposition instead of trying to muscle Miers through — a sure sign of his politically weakened state and an apparent recognition by the White House that it can’t fight a two-front battle, over Miers and over any possible indictments.
Nope. It wasn’t a sign of his politically weakened state. It was a sign that he was overly solicitous of the opposition party. It’s utterly bizarre that a President would give so much concern to consulting with the 45 vote minority that he would so utterly disappoint his base as to alienate his own party’s 55 vote majority. In fact, the very folks who opposed the Miers nomination so vocally, along with a lot of us who didn’t get too excited either way, were and are totally prepared to support this President in fighting the battles he was twice elected saying he wanted to fight.
Certainly it would be nice to stick with the historical record of 90+ vote majorities for Supreme Court nominees, but that is not going to happen with these Democrats no matter how much the President dances with Harry Reid. At the very bottom of the article, they seem to get the point, to grasp what was really wrong here, – “Said [Republican pollster Whit] Ayres: ‘You dance with the one that brung you.'”