c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) It is highly unlikely that Harriet Miers will be confirmed to the Supreme Court. So it would be best for all concerned for President Bush to withdraw her nomination and try again with someone better qualified.

Otherwise, Miers is likely to face a scalding public humiliation during her confirmation hearings, and Bush is going to endure even more serious political damage than he already has.

What went wrong here? It is impossible to know what Bush was thinking, but from the arguments attempted over the last few weeks, it looks something like this:

Miers was selected because Bush trusts her as a personal friend and employee of many years. She was a well-regarded figure in the Texas legal profession. She has almost no paper trail to be dissected by critics. She is an evangelical Christian. And, of course, she is a woman, an important consideration given that she would replace Sandra Day O’Connor.

Bush probably thought he could be assured the support of religious conservatives, both because of his own careful cultivation of them and because of Miers’ religious affiliation. By not picking a judge with a trail of legal cases behind her, he probably figured he could disarm critics from the left who would be inclined to attack any well-known conservative jurist.

This strategy assumed Miers would be able to stonewall her way through the confirmation hearings, adopting the “I can’t comment on that kind of issue” strategy that has so frustrated actual dialogue.

But what has happened is a perfect storm of miscalculations and unintended consequences. The effort to appeal to religious conservatives was botched. In fact, the normally pro-Bush Christian Right is itself divided: Gary Bauer, Phyllis Schlafly, Alan Keyes and several visible Christian Right organizations have come out against Miers, while James Dobson and Richard Land are among those saying they trust the president on this choice.

Meanwhile, the broader coalition of secular and religious conservatives has splintered on the matter. It is striking that Miers appears to have attracted almost no support from Jewish or Catholic conservatives. Her nomination has been attacked by Robert Bork, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, former Bush staffer David Frum and others.

So the ferocious push that the conservative movement gave for John Roberts has dissolved into an internal shoving match when it comes to Harriet Miers. And the effort to appease the right has sent sufficient signals to the left to begin mobilizing them into active opposition.

The competence issue is probably what ultimately will doom the Miers nomination, now in the hands of the Senate Judiciary Committee. She has never been a judge and has offered no evidence of being well-versed in constitutional law. After her courtesy calls on senators and her responses to the Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Miers has not won many friends. Indeed, her questionnaire was returned to her for a redo because of its perceived inadequacy.

My heart goes out to Harriet Miers. It is not her fault that she was asked to do something she likely is not qualified to do. Yet she is the one who will face the music in days to come.

My heart also aches as a Protestant evangelical Christian. Many skeptics think we are, by definition, intellectually sloppy knuckle-draggers from the hinterlands. It does our cause no good when an unprepared person is defended for a position because she happens to share our religious beliefs.

It seems to say that only a sympathetic president’s personal “trust” could ever lead to an evangelical being nominated for such high office. This is not true, but it is an implication some will draw from the Miers nomination.

But the ultimate problem here rests with our broken Supreme Court nominating and review process, which itself reflects our deep social divisions. Interest group pressures from the right and left make it extremely difficult to find any qualified and experienced nominee who will not arouse the fierce and well-funded ire of the activists.

And so the stage is set to nominate a cipher _ the less qualified the better, the less articulate the better, the less experienced the better, reductio ad absurdum. This has got to end. Maybe, after this nomination, it will.

MO/LF END RNS

(David P. Gushee is the Graves professor of moral philosophy at Union University in Jackson, Tenn.)

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