By Steve McNamara

It’s a hoot to watch conservatives flail away at each other over the Harriet Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. Can Miers be trusted to channel Dubya forever or is she just a genial hack who might drift left? Good questions. But the bigger spectacle is the public collapse of the Republican Unity Machine.

After getting their butts kicked in the last two presidential elections, Democrats concluded that much of their problem was that they had no coherent message. They were all over the map on issues. The Republicans, by contrast, had iron discipline within their big tent. Gathered together were rich folks seeking to get richer with more tax breaks, Christian zealots wanting Genesis taught in science class, people scared to death of homosexuals or Mexicans and crusaders enraged by the thought that women who found themselves pregnant after a boozy weekend could postpone child-rearing until a better time.

The genius of Karl Rove was to get backers of these wildly different agendas to line up and take their turn. Do patrician backers of a flat tax—the old country club Republicans—have much in common with barn-burning Baptists or homophobes? Not really. But they were all taught to stay in line. The process was institutionalized in the famous Wednesday meetings of Grover Norquist. Back in Washington a hundred or more conservative champions of various causes would each week make their pitch for a prominent spot on the marquee. Say what you will about the policies in question, the system worked.

And now it doesn’t work. Rove is looking a bit twitchy with a Grand Jury sniffing around. Norquist’s buddy Jack Abramoff had a political train wreck and the exploded parts are landing dangerously close to Norquist. Then came Miers. The Republicans’ seamless coalition promptly unraveled. I’ll bet it can’t be stitched back together soon, if ever.

I OWE AN APOLOGY to Ann Coulter. Last week I noted that her reaction to the Miers nomination was to say the person in question was “mediocre” and to leave it at that. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Once Coulter uncrossed her legs and wiped the foam from her mouth, she really let fly. Some choice passages:

To Bill O’Reilly: “I don’t think she’s qualified for the job… This shows stunning arrogance by the president and it is absurd. We’ve had a 25-year legal movement to create a farm team of incredibly talented conservative lawyers. Running the Texas Lottery Commission is not a qualification to sit on the highest court in the land.”

On her own website Coulter revealed a deep snobbishness about where Miers got her law degree. From the way Coulter ran on you would think she got her own law degree from Harvard. Actually it was from Michigan. Here’s Coulter:

I eagerly await the announcement of President Bush’s real nominee to the Supreme Court. If the president meant Harriet Miers seriously, I have to assume Bush wants to go back to Crawford and let Dick Cheney run the country.

Unfortunately for Bush, he could nominate his Scottish terrier Barney,
and some conservatives would rush to defend him, claiming to be in
possession of secret information convincing them that the pooch is a
true conservative and listing Barney’s many virtues—loyalty, courage, never jumps on the furniture …

Harriet Miers went to Southern Methodist University Law School, which is not ranked at all by the serious law school reports and ranked No. 52 by US News and World Report. Her greatest legal accomplishment is being the first woman commissioner of the Texas Lottery.

I know conservatives have been trained to hate people who went to elite universities, and generally that’s a good rule of thumb. But not when it comes to the Supreme Court.

First, Bush has no right to say, “Trust me.” He was elected to represent the American people, not to be dictator for eight years. Among the coalitions that elected Bush are people who have been laboring in the trenches for a quarter-century to change the legal order in America. While Bush was still boozing it up in the early ’80s, Ed Meese, Antonin Scalia, Robert Bork and all the founders of the Federalist Society began creating a farm team of massive legal talent on the right.

To casually spurn the people who have been taking slings and arrows all
these years and instead reward the former commissioner of the Texas
Lottery with a Supreme Court appointment is like pinning a medal of
honor on some flunky paper-pusher with a desk job at the Pentagon—or on John Kerry—while ignoring your infantrymen doing the fighting and dying.

Second, even if you take seriously William F. Buckley’s line about
preferring to be governed by the first 200 names in the Boston telephone book than by the Harvard faculty, the Supreme Court is not supposed to govern us. Being a Supreme Court justice ought to be a mind-numbingly tedious job suitable only for super-nerds trained in legal reasoning like John Roberts. Being on the Supreme Court isn’t like winning a “Best Employee of the Month” award. It’s a real job.

One Web site defending Bush’s choice of a graduate from an
undistinguished law school complains that Miers’ critics “are playing
the Democrats’ game,” claiming that the “GOP is not the party which
idolizes Ivy League acceptability as the criterion of intellectual and
mental fitness.” (In the sort of error that results from trying to sound
“Ivy League” rather than being clear, that sentence uses the
grammatically incorrect “which” instead of “that.” Web sites defending
the academically mediocre would be a lot more convincing without all the grammatical errors.)

Actually, all the intellectual firepower in the law is coming from
conservatives right now—and thanks for noticing! Liberals got stuck
trying to explain Roe v. Wade and are still at work 30 years later
trying to come up with a good argument.

But the main point is: Au contraire! It is conservatives defending
Miers’ mediocre resume who are playing the Democrats’ game. Contrary to recent practice, the job of being a Supreme Court justice is not to be a philosopher-king. Only someone who buys into the liberals’ view of Supreme Court justices as philosopher-kings could hold legal training irrelevant to a job on the Supreme Court.

To be sure, if we were looking for philosopher-kings, an SMU law grad
would probably be preferable to a graduate from an elite law school. But if we’re looking for lawyers with giant brains to memorize obscure legal cases and to compose clearly reasoned opinions about ERISA pre-emption, the doctrine of equivalents in patent law, limitation of liability in admiralty, and supplemental jurisdiction under Section 1367—I think we want the nerd from an elite law school. Bush may as well appoint his chauffeur head of NASA as put Miers on the Supreme Court.

Third and finally, some jobs are so dirty, you can only send in someone
who has the finely honed hatred of liberals acquired at elite universities to do them. The devil is an abstraction for normal, decent Americans living in the red states. By contrast, at the top universities, you come face to face with the devil every day, and you learn all his little tropes and tricks.

Conservatives from elite schools have already been subjected to liberal
blandishments and haven’t blinked. These are right-wingers who have
fought off the best and the brightest the blue states have to offer. The New York Times isn’t going to mau-mau them—as it does intellectual lightweights like Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee—by dangling fawning profiles before them. They aren’t waiting for a pat on the head from Nina Totenberg or Linda Greenhouse. To paraphrase Archie Bunker, when you find a conservative from an elite law school, you’ve really got something.

However nice, helpful, prompt and tidy she is, Harriet Miers isn’t
qualified to play a Supreme Court justice on “The West Wing,” let alone
to be a real one. Both Republicans and Democrats should be alarmed that Bush seems to believe his power to appoint judges is absolute. This is what “advice and consent” means.