Confusion to our enemies

That is the toast the Democrats will be making tonight. Hugh Hewitt has this postmortem:

The Miers precedent cements an extraconstitutional new standard for nominees. Had the framers intended only judges for the court, they would have said so. No doubt some Miers critics will protest a willingness to support nominees who have never sat on the bench, but no president is going to send one forward after this debacle. The center of the Miers opposition was National Review's blog, The Corner, and the blog ConfirmThem.com, both with sharp-tongued, witty and relentless writers. They unleashed every argument they could find, and the pack that followed them could not be stopped. Even if a senator had a mind to urge hearings and a vote, he had to feel that it would call down on him the verbal wrath of the anti-Miers zealots.

It will be the lasting glory or the lasting shame of The Corner and others involved in driving Ms. Miers from the field, depending on what happens, and not just with the next nominee and his or her votes on the court, but all the nominees that follow, and all the Senate campaigns that will be affected, as well as the presidential race in 2008.

This triumph of the conservative punditocracy will have lasting consequences, and I hope my fears are misplaced. The first returns will come in the decision on parental notification statutes that will be argued before the Supreme Court in late November. Absent a miracle of Senate efficiency, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor will cast one of her last votes on the most important abortion-rights case in a few years. And then the accounting will begin in earnest.

The problem of these bitter nomination battles was created by the Supreme Court's injudicious rulings on issues it should have avoided. That can't be remedied by anybody except the Court itself, but until we start appointing justices which some common sense, which I believe Harriet Miers has, these appointments will be ever more painful and bitter displays of bile. I just wish the right had been able to restrain themselves. The Republicans were right to try to restore civility when they confirmed Breyer and Ginsberg, if that spirit had remained through the past few weeks, I think we might have succeeded. As it now stands, I think the bitterness will continue.