by Matt Barr

"I came to conclude this was not her idea."

Said Sen. Dick "Dick" Durbin, D-Ill. Me too. Otherwise, Durbin's side of the ideological spectrum is making little sense this morning.

Via Red State we see that:

Kos, in a post titled The 'Up or Down Vote' talking point is dead, writes:

Senate Democrats have helpfully emailed around the list below of GOP passion for the "up or down vote". Too bad the Miers fiasco has taken away that talking point from their repertoire.

They're going to need new material if Bush decides to try and make nice with his base by nominating a genuine winger.

Red State's John Cole makes a kind of klunky argument to the contrary in kind of overwrought language, owing I think to the fact the Kos argument is kind of retarded. Opponents of Miers who support the President wanted her -- of course -- not to be seated on the Court. Similarities to Senate Democrats' tactics with lower court nominees end there. Miers opponents preferred withdrawal to a more damaging, losing Senate vote. Moreover, most were willing, through gritted teeth if necessary, to hear her out in her Judiciary Committee hearings in hopes they'd be swayed. In other words, it's because Miers would have a hearing and an up or down vote that opponents made such hay.

A useful parallel might be if the Republicans nominated a dud for my Congressional district, about whom serious questions were raised regarding his fitness for the office or ability to win. I might want to see him withdraw from the race while there was still time to run a better candidate with brighter prospects. Doing so wouldn't make me anti-democracy, and I doubt even Kos could make that silly argument. "I guess Republicans who go on about Dud the Congressional candidate don't really want a vote in November!" No.

The key difference, of course, is that Congressional candidates are picked in a primary vote. If primary voters make an idiotic choice, it would be difficult for them to have second thoughts, barring revelations that only come out after the primaries. With Miers, pundits and other constituents had no say in the vetting and selection.

Isn't the President owed the kind of deference the primary process gives Congressional candidates? As I argued here, "[d]eference means in close cases where you might disagree, you give the benefit of the doubt. [Miers] is not a close case.... The benefit of the doubt isn't an unlimited license."

Finally, there is, or should be, an obvious facial difference between petitioning the government for redress of grievances -- where have I heard that? -- and blocking a qualified nominee from full Senate consideration who would almost certainly have majority support. Or, drilling down: Have critics of the filibuster of judicial nominees attacked Democratic Senators' constituents who opposed the nominees, or the Democratic Senators' own procedural maneuvers? Why aren't conservatives attacking Kossacks and their MoveOn.orgies today for not insisting Miers be blocked in the Senate? Because there's no inconsistency, and also because it doesn't matter.

Why Miers had to be withdrawn does matter, and that was the top story on the radio at 7 this morning when my alarm went off: The withdrawal is evidence that the administration is in the clutches of the extreme right wing of the party. "They had a litmus test and Harriet Miers failed that test," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Mass (get it?), said. The best response to this is the one that's going around and probably best represented by this piece at American Thinker, compiling and reproducing anti-Miers quotes from Sens. Levin, Leahy, Boxer and Schumer. Democrats weren't calling for Meirs' withdrawal, but can't with a straight face today act as though they had this terrifically acceptable choice yanked out form under them by James Dobson (what's that? Dobson was a vocal supporter of Miers? Who's this extreme wing of the party, then, and when will Dobson be welcome back to it?).

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