I've been meaning to say this very thing

One of the problems with having both children and a business to look after (and it should be understood that this is my favorite euphemistic phrase for "laziness") is that, by the time I get around to putting my thoughts out there, some other schlub has invariably gotten to it first. In this case, it is Charles Krauthammer, columnist at the Washington Post, who has used far better words than I could knit together to question the wisdom of Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court:

By choosing a nominee suggested by Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid and well known only to himself, the president has ducked a fight on the most important domestic question dividing liberals from conservatives: the principles by which one should read and interpret the Constitution. For a presidency marked by a courageous willingness to think and do big things, this nomination is a sorry retreat into smallness.

I cannot help but agree. My take on the Roberts nomination was that Bush was putting forth a fairly plain-vanilla prospect as something of a peace offering, a move which would allow him to appoint a more conservative justice in round two. By offering us a virtual unknown (and for all the left's hemming and hawing about "what do we know about Roberts?" the answer was quite a bit), a close ally with a strange recent history of political shifts, a person who was in addition to all other things Bush's personal attorney, Bush has made what I consider both a lazy and (dare I say it?) cowardly decision. And this fact, more than the question of the credentials of the nominee, is what troubles me.

Say what you want about Bush, but he has not heretofore shown himself to be a man who thinks small. In his tax-reform proposals, his response to 9/11, his dealings with Iraq--this is a man who thinks and acts in bold strokes, often informed by his moral center. (I understand that many of you on the left will think that I've hit on the crux of the problem, but that's a subject for another day.) The Miers nomination, on a personal level, is simply disillusioning. I don't know whether the vicious Katrina backlash has made Bush gun-shy, or whether he was never the man he pretended to be. He just doesn't have the stomach for a fight--a good fight, one that he should wage--and his uncontroversial nominee (already praised by Senate minority leader Harry Reid, for God's sake!) is the prime piece of evidence.

Tags: Harriet Miers, Supreme Court