The Shifting Supreme Court, Part 12

Well, it appears that this particular series of mine is at an end: As most of you probably know by now, Harriet Miers withdrew her nomination to the Supreme Court.

In a statement, President Bush said he “reluctantly accepted” her decision to withdraw, after weeks of insisting that he did not want her to step down. Bush said Miers withdrew because of a bipartisan effort in Congress to gain access to internal documents related to her current role as counsel to the president. But politics also played a role: Bush’s conservative backers had doubts about her ideological purity, and Democrats had little incentive to help the nominee or the embattled GOP president.

So, time will tell if Bush will make a perhaps wiser choice for a new nominee. Apparently, he had some other women nominees in mind, but they had withdrawn because they didn’t want to be involved in the battles imminent in being a Supreme Court nominee. Let’s hope that a good candidate will be selected and that someone will be brave enough to step up to the plate. Until the next nominee…

To read the text of Miers' resignation letter, click here.