Democrats' Colossal Missed Opportunity to Shape the Supreme Court

Neas' enthusiasm was initially matched by that of other Bush critics, such as the Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who told people that he had been the first to suggest Miers as Supreme Court material to Bush. While Bush's top adviser Karl Rove insists Bush was already mulling a Miers nomination when Reid chimed in, Bush clearly felt more confident in making the move with the expectation that Reid would deliver Democratic votes for Miers. This wasn't a far-fetched notion: Roberts, with far more of a conservative pedigree than Miers, had just won confirmation with the support of half the Democratic caucus.

The seeming liberal triumph of the Miers nomination, of course, would give way to a conservative backlash. Almost immediately, conservative judicial activists rose up against Miers, citing her lack of experience in constitutional law and sparking a rebellion that eventually forced Bush to withdraw her nomination.

The alacrity with which conservatives turned on Bush, a president they had lionized after 9/11 as the great leader of his time, shocked people on both sides of the judicial divide. It was a powerful signal that the fight over the Supreme Court transcended party loyalty. This was a long twilight struggle, and one side -- the right -- understood the stakes well enough to know they had to gash Bush to preserve their agenda. The other side, it turned out, was slow to grasp the implications until it was too late.

Reid's initial praise of Miers was quickly muted. Liberal stalwarts including Sen. Ted Kennedy declared that they would wait until Miers' confirmation hearings to pass judgment. This was a much milder response that the gales of fury that Kennedy usually inflicted on Republican nominees, but it inadvertently fed into the conservative critique of Miers as unknown and unqualified: a non-entity.

As the conservative attacks on Miers mounted, Reid and his fellow Democrats seemed only too happy to stand on the sidelines of the Republican-on-Republican scrum, while letting the last chance to rescue Miers slip away.

Significantly, Bush made it clear that he didn't give up on Miers simply because of what he called "the firestorm of criticism we received from our supporters." It was the failure of Democrats to lend their backing to the besieged Miers.

"When the left started criticizing Harriet, too, I knew the nomination was doomed," Bush wrote in his memoir, Decision Points.

Today, the notion of Miers as a misguided, unfit choice for the Supreme Court has taken root, partly because of her lack of any defenders on the left or right outside of Bush's inner circle. The nomination seems to have passed as a blip, a footnote to much more consequential judicial battles before and after.

In fact, the Miers debacle was not only a colossal missed opportunity for the Democrats, but a major turning point in the judicial wars. The failure to build consensus around a centrist nominee, based on her character and life experiences rather than ideology, effectively ended any hope of compromise over the Supreme Court. Every nominee confirmed since then has been, for better or worse, a figure with a long, ingrained record of decision-making that reinforced the predilections of the party in power. This was the recipe for bitterness and conflict that followed.