It could have been worse

The best that can be said of President Bush’s choice of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court is that it could have been much worse.
There is a big, long line of knuckledragging neanderthal judges anxiously waiting for the chance to roll-back all the advances of the 20th Century and take us back into the dark ages.
I don’t think Miers is capable of doing that even if she did share their views simply because she has no experience in the realm of constitutional law.
She might turnout to be the fifth vote that overturns Roe vs. Wade and sends thousands of poor women to the back alleys to end unwanted pregnancies. But she also might not be. And just the fact that there is that slight chance is about the best that we could hope for after Bush won the 2004 election.

I find the right-wing handwringing over Miers to be delightfully entertaining. But there is one line of criticism of Miers that reflects the nation’s elite east-coast, west-coast bias that I find highly offensive. I wonder if there would be as many people saying Miers is unqualified for the court if she had been an attorney with a major law firm in New York or L.A. and had attended an elite Ivy League school rather than Southern Methodist University?