The full Tim McCarthy. He was the Secret Service agent who stood like Stonewall and took the bullet for Ronald Reagan outside the Washington Hilton. Harriet Miers can withdraw her name, take the hit, and let the president's protectors throw him in the car. Her toughness and professionalism would appear wholly admirable. She'd not just survive; she'd flourish, going from much-spoofed office wife to world-famous lawyer and world-class friend. Added side benefit: Her nobility makes her attackers look bad. She's better than they, more loyal and serious. An excellent moment of sacrifice and revenge.
Bush can then nominate someone with better jurisprudential and originalist bona fides and Hugh Hewitt notwithstanding I think the much ballyhooed rift on the Right will be quickly healed. The right will not get a better champion than W for a long time and I think we know it. I don't think she will do it - hopefully because she's aching for an opportunity to prove her conservative critics wrong. This is the easiest way out and if I were the Dems I'd let this drag on until next year if I could.
All else being equal I'd stand by the President though I wouldn't do a Tim McCarthy for Miers. And maybe if the nomination is defeated, the silver lining would be that the President gets to send up another nominee and it shows that the GOP and the right do indeed engage on principle.
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A bit more on Miers:
David Brooks examines [Times Select only] Miers' columns for the Texas Bar Journal when she was president of the Texas Bar association. It's the largest publicly available body of work extant from Miers. Perhaps it's cherrypicking but I think Brooks is dead-on when he says:
I don't know if by mere quotation I can fully convey the relentless march of vapid abstractions that mark Miers's prose. Nearly every idea is vague and depersonalized. Nearly every debatable point is elided. It's not that Miers didn't attempt to tackle interesting subjects. She wrote about unequal access to the justice system, about the underrepresentation of minorities in the law and about whether pro bono work should be mandatory. But she presents no arguments or ideas, except the repetition of the bromide that bad things can be eliminated if people of good will come together to eliminate bad things.
in response to sentences like these: [from Miers' columns]
"We have to understand and appreciate that achieving justice for all is in jeopardy before a call to arms to assist in obtaining support for the justice system will be effective. Achieving the necessary understanding and appreciation of why the challenge is so important, we can then turn to the task of providing the much needed support."
You know when you read a sentence where you have to re-read it thrice to understand what it means? Uninspiring.
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