« Wednesday blogroll additions and shuffling | Main | The widening rift »

October 05, 2005

Someone call FEMA

It's starting to look like conservatives in the Senate might revolt over the nomination of Ms. Miers. WaPo reports on a pair of very testy meetings between inside-the-beltway conservatives and Bush's representatives.

At one point in the first of the two off-the-record sessions, according to several people in the room, White House adviser Ed Gillespie suggested that some of the unease about Miers "has a whiff of sexism and a whiff of elitism." Irate participants erupted and demanded that he take it back.

What's interesting to me is how when it was Roberts' nomination that was being debated we all heard many times how Bush had won reelection and how everyone knew that he'd promised over and over to nominate "strict constructionists" and therefore Democrats and other critics ought to acquiesce to the alleged will of the people. Yet it's patently clear that the GOP elite aren't interested in whether Ms. Miers is a strict constructionist or not. This snit is about ideology!

Phyllis Schlafly summed the opposition up best by observing, "(w)e feel this is a disappointment in President Bush. If it's going to be a woman, we expected an equal heavyweight to Ruth Bader Ginsburg and her liberal stance, and we did not get that in Miss Miers."

Michael Reynolds at The Mighty Middle argues, with a heavy dose of wry humor and an unerring feel for the bottom line, that both ideological sides are playing a grand game of charades when in fact the real issue is a-b-o-r-t-i-o-n. But, given how the bulk of the conservative opposition to Ms. Miers comes from social conservatives I wonder if Abel might not be closer to the truth when he suggests that there's been a paradigm shift and that now it's about gay rights.

Of course there is always my hypothesis that Bush just isn't giving obvious enough eye winks when he tells conservatives to "trust me" about Ms. Miers.

Posted by Kevin at October 5, 2005 11:19 PM