Harriet Miers 2.0, The Re-Release

According to Mike Allen's column this week in TIME, President Bush and his aides are planning to "re-launch" the Harriet Miers nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court after two completely disastrous weeks. The President's cronies have been sqawking this weekend that "few Republicans have attacked this President so frontally and lived to tell about it." Interesting threat coming from a virtual lame duck administration whose poll numbers are flirting with the 30s depending on the day. The White House should learn its lesson from the Democrats' stunning defeats in the 2004 elections: substance matters more than style. The Democrats thought if they just phrased their arguments better that they would win, because their message was right-on, they thought. Wrong. Poll after poll, and Democrat strategist after Democrat strategist confirmed that the Left-wing message of the Democrat Party was what led to their failure in the '04 races.

Why does President Bush think he is any different? For the last five years (yes, since Bush started running for President in 1999) we have been promised and assured that it was always his hope and intention to appoint justices in the model of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. At best, Miers has only the potential to be like Thomas and Scalia. Thomas and Scalia were both appellate court judges with conservative records on their jurisprudential resume. It has obviously not gone without notice that Ms. Miers has no such resume. Instead, the President has demanded (he has certainly not asked nicely) that conservatives trust him. Indeed, trust him like we trusted his Father (Remember David Souter), Ronald Reagan (Anthony Kennedy), Gerald Ford (John Paul Stevens), Richard Nixon (Harry Blackmun), and Dwight Eisenhower (Earl Warren). The Republicans' history of "trust me" nominees is nothing short of catastrophic. George Will , Ann Coulter, Charles Krauthammer, and Robert Bork, have all publicly opposed the Miers nomination, along with countless other conservative leaders. The criticism is the same: Miers isn't qualified and she isn't proven. And as Judge Bork points out, the only people (other than the President's cronies) who are saying anything nice about Miers are Democrats; that should tell the President something.

In light of all of this, the President has determined to re-launch the Miers nomination. He plans to parade a list of Texas Supreme Court justices who will attest to Harriet Miers' qualifications. Since when do we determine the fitness of a Supreme Court nominee based on character references? This isn't the Good Neighbor of the Year Award, this is the United States Supreme Court, and if Ms. Miers' resume does not substantiate her readiness to serve on the high court, the President should think again.

This is beginning to look like the 4th re-invention of Al Gore during the 2000 Presidential Campaign. Here are my predictions for the Harriet Miers 2.0 Re-Release:

1) Miers will swing through the Southern states wearing ankle-length dresses and a bonnet to appeal to Chauvinistic White Males.

2) James Dobson and the President will do their secret handshake in public, proving to conservatives that Miers really is pro-life.

3) President Bush will apologize again for betraying his base and then beg its forgiveness by singing a trio with Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Il entitled "Give Me One More Chance."

4) Pat Robertson will publicly demand the assassination of any Republican who opposes Miers.

5) Karl Rove will accidentally leak to Robert Novak the name of Harriet Miers' undercover stunt double who will be filling in for her at the Senate Judiciary committee.

6) To appease Conservatives, Miers will give a contribution to Tom DeLay's legal defense fund.

7) Miers will grow a beard and randomly insert the word "originalism" into every sentence.

8) John Kerry and Harriet Miers will do a joint press conference Monday morning talking about how they miraculously lost all of their wrinkles over the weekend.

9) Miers will travel to Houston to train for her new job on NASA's new zero gravity BLACK ROBE simulator.

10) CBS will launch a new reality series "Who Wants to Be a Supreme Court Justice?" where Miers and 6 other average attorneys from across the country will run around New York playing "big city lawyer" and then be interviewed by Donald Trump for the job of a lifetime.